ABSTRACT
The travel narratives written after the virtual collapse of the sugar industry change in the ways they represent an uncultivated landscape. Landscape is the object of close investigation, as imperial visions have to be re-shaped and the islands need to be re-possessed. The natural landscape does not appear to offend imperialism's 'finer sensibilities', whereas uncultivated land is the subject of lamentations in the later works. And landscape itself is less often described than is trade, perhaps a marker of the increasing significance of commerce to the writers and the cultures they describe. The particular and physical beauty of the Caribbean is indistinguishable from the dreams of profit and paternalism, the twinned fantasies of European development and benevolence, which structure and rationalize imperial trade. Despite Matthew Gregory Lewis assertion that his intentions were merely 'fanciful and romantic', it should be noted that with the abolition of the slave trade, planters needed to develop inducements to slaves to reproduce.
