ABSTRACT
Sidney Smith calls for settler locations to constitute "a new empire, with the fifth part of the world, and that the finest and richest, for a dominion". The second British Empire provided both the physical infrastructure and ideological rationale for a considerable amount of travel and travel writing in the southern hemisphere. Nineteenth-century colonies, such as Australia and New Zealand, stimulated many travelers to explore their exotic climates, flora and fauna, and novel social organization. Charles Wentworth Dilke's Greater Britain provides a particularly explicit instance of the ways in which travel writing maps a geography of power and influence, but it is by no means the only example of such discursive and ideological work. Second only to exploration journals, travel writing transforms space into place, in Paul Carter's terms. Cultural technologies had a particular role in transmitting such geopolitical ideas. Dilke's notoriously offensive categorization of Anglo-Saxon's others is self-evident, but the racial categorization of the English raises more complex questions.
