The years between 1790 and 1830 saw over 150 million people brought under British Imperial control, and one of the most momentous outbursts of British literary and artistic production, announcing a new world of social and individual traumas and possibilities. This book traces the emergence of new forms of imperialism and capitalism as part of a culture of modernization in the period, and looks at the ways in which they were identified with, and contested in, Romanticism, through original readings of texts by Wordsworth, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Scott.