Poetry, peripheries and empire and the Million whom a rice-contracting Governor caused to perish – in America the recent enormities of the Scalp-Merchants – the four Quarters of the Globe groan beneath the intolerable iniquity of this nation!”9 As a critic of government at home, Coleridge took it as his prophetic role to show his fellow Britons that their empire was a sham Empire was the globalization of tyranny and brutality Southey and Coleridge were middle-class, university-educated intellectuals The extremity of their rhetoric reveals their degree of disenchantment with the culture of “getting and spending” (in Wordsworth’s words) that they saw in London, Bristol, and Liverpool – the cities enriched by imperial trade.10 But it also reveals the political confidence given to radical groups by events in America When Britain’s colonists there had rebelled against arbitrary government, they had won the support of English Unitarians – including Southey and Coleridge’s heroes, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley – who likened the colonists’ political disenfranchisement to their own And when the colonists proved successful in their revolution against rule from London, Dissenters of all classes were quick to turn them into morale-boosting (and heroic) examples of how imperial government could be overthrown The London artisan and antinomian Christian, William Blake, printed his own tribute to the colonial rebels America: a Prophecy (1793) is an anti-imperialist allegory in which Blake predicts the destruction of his own nation’s armies: at the feet of Washington down fall’n They grovel on the sand and writhing lie While all The British soldiers thro’ the thirteen states sent up a howl Of anguish: threw their swords & muskets to the earth & ran From their encampments and dark castles seeking where to hide From the grim flames (pl 15)11 By the 1790s then, a new generation of poets was coming to public attention, a generation for which opposition to British rule in America, India, and the West Indies was formative Romantic poetry was, in origin, anti-imperialist By 1814, matters had changed considerably In that year, Wordsworth was in agreement with Coleridge and Southey when, in The Excursion, he declared Britain’s mission to be the colonization of East and West with its surplus people These were people from the rural peripheries of Britain who, stricken with poverty, as Wordsworth had earlier lamented in Lyrical Ballads, had better emigrate to Canada, Australia, and Africa than be sucked into the London that corrupted most who went there 183 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008