ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Britain's other material stakes in the western hemisphere at the beginning of the nineteenth century, such as slavery in the West Indies and the ambition, is to colonize Spanish American territories, attempted in 1806. The struggle between freedom and slavery gripped the publics of Britain and the Americas well into the nineteenth century, animating one of the motifs central to Romanticism. An analysis of Southey's Madoc alongside James Montgomery's The West Indies, and Francisco Miranda and James Mill's article entitled 'Emancipation of Spanish America' (1809), shows that discourses generated about the New World provided an imaginative matrix for the Romantic representation of independence and slavery. The four part poem examines the history of the Americas from the conquest to the introduction of African slavery, and the efforts to abolish the trade. Rather than the belated Romanticism that the criollos perceived they were handed, the Americas helped define the Romantic debate.
