Culture and capital: British travel in the nineteenth -century American *West

The American West served as an important physical and discursive site for the renegotiation of the Anglo-American relationship in the nineteenth century. Between the end of the War of 1812 and the beginning of the First World War, British men and women of the upper and middle classes traveled to, invested in, and wrote about the American West. British travel and investment in the American West provided distinctive opportunities for the British elite to elaborate gender, class, national and racial identities.;The elite British encounter with the West took four particular discursive forms, each studied in one of the following chapters. First, the American West served as an escapist antidote to, and a departure point for criticism of, British modernity. Second, the British elite saw the American West as a region where investment and emigration could revitalize the fortunes of declining families while providing surplus gentlemen with occupations and a gentlemanly life no longer viable in Britain. Third, the British in the American West found ample fuel for a romanticized view of nature that conflicted with their enmeshment in growing industries of extraction and tourism. Lastly, the American West illustrated the explosive economic growth of the United States, and yet it also demonstrated to British observers the reassuring fact that fundamentally, Americans were civilized Anglo-Saxons, committed to taking up the white man's burden, who drew their sense of imperial responsibility from their British heritage and character. Though separate and different, these four discourses were interconnected and mutually reinforcing.