Although Swindler’s Progress is, at least in part, a biographical tale of one man—John Dow, alias John Colquhoun, alias Edward, Viscount Lascelles—it introduces its readers to a diverse range of characters and personalities and to large swathes of Britain and its empire. In tracking Dow’s story, McKenzie travels between the seventeenth-century Caribbean and nineteenth-century England, Scotland, Van Diemen’s Land, and New South Wales. Along the way, the book moves through a score of subjects. These include the semi-enslaved conditions of nineteenth-century Scottish coal miners; the familial and political machinations of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British aristocracy; the conditions faced by Caribbean slaves and Australian convicts; the ways in which the Industrial Revolution transformed the Yorkshire woollen industry; and more. McKenzie’s claim that Swindler’s Progress is “less a biography of Dow and the Lascelles than a biography of their times” (297) is amply borne out.

At its core, Swindler’s Progress is a book about a series of interlocking “big” questions. It is about empire in the Age of Liberty and about the ways in which “British and colonial societies were intertwined in debates about what it meant to be free” (7). And, it is also “about imposture and social opportunism” and the extent to which these practices “bound together people, places and ideas across the British empire” (293). McKenzie has explored some of these themes to great effect elsewhere, most notably in her 2004 book Scandal in the Colonies, and she is now working on a new project on empire and liberty. In Swindler’s Progress, however, she gives these issues dramatic form by exploring them through the prism of one man’s life tale. John Dow’s “obscure and unlikely tale” thus becomes a highly successful “new way to understand and to write of some of the key events” transforming “Britain and its empire” (294) in these decades.

Transported to Van Diemen’s Land for fraud, Dow (if that was indeed his name) had for months prior to his arrest passed himself off as John Colquhoun, son of Sir James Colquhoun. En route to the penal colony, he settled on a new persona, announcing he was Edward, Lord Viscount Lascelles, of Harewood House, Yorkshire. On eventually gaining his freedom Dow moved to Sydney where he again set about defrauding creditors by telling much the same story that had got him sent to the colonies in the first place. He was, he again declared, the disgraced son of an aristocrat and, although temporarily estranged from his father, he would nevertheless shortly come into money. A likely story but one that contemporaries seemed willing to swallow both because Dow styled himself as an aristocrat and also because the real Edward was a subject of scandal and mystery, having been sent into European exile by his family after marrying a woman of decidedly low status.

What makes Dow’s life story more than just another crime story are the ways in which his imposture intersected with some of the key political and social issues of his day. Dow might have been a fraudster, but in making untrue and/or inflated claims about his wealth and status he was far from alone. The Lascelles family had also invented and reinvented itself: climbing out of the minor gentry to become, within two centuries and via the brutalities of the slave trade and slavery, one of the richest and most powerful families in England. As McKenzie makes clear, social climbers and imposters, like the wealthy and politically conservative settler James Mudie, who styled himself “Major” although he had never made it past lieutenant before being dismissed from the army, also abounded in the Australian colonies. Dow’s crimes are thus highly revealing of contemporary practices and values, and herein lay their significance. As McKenzie notes, for “an historian, an impostor’s importance lies precisely in how he … is able to lay bare the assumptions of his own society” by dropping “clues … as to how status was made manifest, disputed and endorsed” (295).

Having secured their own position, the Lascelles then did all they could to pull up the ladder: opposing reform—in both Britain and the Caribbean—and seeking to reify the position of a supposedly age-old aristocracy. In New South Wales, “Major” James Mudie pursued a similarly exclusivist path: seeking out ways to restrict status and power to members of an elite who were rapidly enriching themselves off the backs (quite literally at times) of their unfree convict servants. Mudie was part of a clique of powerful Hunter Valley landowners renowned for their harsh treatment of convict workers, and in 1833 his estate was the site of an uprising. This rebellion poured fuel on already rancorous debate about who exactly ought to enjoy the much-vaunted rights of the freeborn Englishman—on what grounds, by what status? Those who sought reform called for an inquiry. Against this backdrop, John Dow took to the stage once again—riding across the colony, accompanied by a servant, and declaring himself Viscount Lascelles. Everywhere he went he announced he was a government commissioner sent to ask questions about the treatment of the colony’s convict labor force. If this was Dow’s finest act, it was also his last. The press and public attention his claims inevitably attracted ended in another court appearance and with a second sentence of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, this time for life.

This is a really fabulous book and one that I found hard to put down. This is partly because McKenzie writes in such a fluent and engaging fashion, but it is also a testament to the fantastic and at times fantastical tale she has to tell. For all those interested, as McKenzie is here, in writing not only for scholars but also for a broader informed public, Swindler’s Progress presents an exemplary study in “how-to.” By telling John Dow’s story, McKenzie also adds to a growing body of scholarly works on empire that focus on transnational biographies and global lives. Finally, Swindler’s Progress also provides constant reminders of the multiple interconnections between Britain and its empire and of the ways in which ostensibly similar issues could nevertheless play themselves out in subtly different ways across time, place, and space. As we pursue John Dow across the globe, we are, as a result, repeatedly reminded of the importance of writing histories that recognize “that developments in British and colonial societies were part and parcel of the same process” (296).