Representing Africa:Landscape, Exploration and Empire in Southern Africa, 1780-1870

Representing Africa examines the ways in which British travellers, explorers and artists viewed southern Africa in a period of evolving and expanding British interest in the region. It brings together diverse themes, such as the aesthetics of landscape, scientific expeditions, missionary activity and the impact of hunting, in order to illuminate more fully the relationship between European travellers and African landscapes.

Southern Africa played a varied but vital role in Britain's maritime and imperial stories. It acted as a staging post for those on their way to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, accommodated expanding commercial and scientific interests, enabled the projection of maritime power across two oceans and, not least, became home for a rich variety of people and cultures. Representations of southern African landscape and maritime spaces reflect this multifaceted position, as do the people who recorded and disseminated them. Sailors, scientists, missionaries and migrants - together with explorers and artists - interpreted the region according to their own preoccupations and priorities. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, contemporary travelogues and visual images, this book posits landscape as a useful prism through which to view changing British attitudes towards Africa. It asks how and why these representations of landscape came about as well as the roles they played in the British imaginings and understandings of the region.

Richly illustrated, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students interested in British, African, imperial and exploration history, art history, and landscape and environment studies.

John McAleer is Curator of Eighteenth-Century Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich