ABSTRACT
The life and career of Harriet Martineau, which spanned the Romantic through the Victorian eras, paralleled an epoch in British history that was unprecedented in terms of its impact on the global community. As one of the earliest professional women writers and one of the most prolific, Martineau, in her life and career, embodied the spirit of revolution, reform, and imperialism that found expression in the literature of the period. Martineau wrote about finance, economics, and a wide variety of legislative policies, but it is her emphases on the cultural components of the Civilizing Mission that best illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of British Imperialism. Her writing on Africa investigates abolition and emancipation; American slavery and the Civil War. Eastern Life, Present and Past records Martineau's 1846-47 tour of the Middle East, revealing that the European "scramble" for North Africa predates that of sub-Saharan Africa by nearly a century.
