ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on that perspective too in order to complicate received notions of race and its insurgence during the Romantic era, roughly 1780 to 1830. It works to hold race open to its ambiguities, allowing multiple perspectives and definitions to interact toward the end of recovering accounts otherwise drowned in the din of meliorist criticism. Britain's spectacular domination of the trade, combined with the quasi-independent status of its colonies calls for a suppler if less certain model for inquiry, one better attuned to the dynamics of the Atlantic economy, its myriad exchanges among different places, peoples, and goods. The culture of British Romanticism records their encounters in poems, pictures, performances, and pastimes. Romanticism thus owes much of its force to the dislocated people whose economic and creative labor made it possible.
