The relationship between the economic and cultural boom over the long eighteenth century and Britain’s exploitation of people and landscapes taken as part of colonial expansion has been a rich area of academic debate spurred on by the belated recognition of the suffering it caused across the world. As the most magnificent realizations of that extracted wealth, and as the prized assets of the contemporary heritage industry, country houses have sat uncomfortably in the limelight for over a decade now. Given the need to confront and understand the colonial legacy not as something separate or distant, but as an important part of British culture, books such as this are to be welcomed. It is a handsomely produced and well-illustrated volume that is structured almost in the form of an eighteenth-century domestic tour. Eight thematic chapters, each situated in a different landscape or country house context, are presented in a broadly chronological order. After an introductory chapter on the Caribbean, the first two chapters focus on Danson House in south London, built by John Boyd, who was born on St. Kitts to Scottish–Irish parents, and on Harewood House in Yorkshire, built by Edwin Lascelles, born on Barbados c.1713. Perry links these first two case studies as “connected with the port of London” (14). Certainly, in the case of the Lascelles family at Harewood House, this characterization and the author’s determination not to “distract from my ultimate focus on Britain” risks simplifying the significant role the family played in all aspects of the Atlantic slave trade, including ownership of a factory ship off the west coast of Africa on which the newly enslaved were processed for onward trafficking to the Americas. The tour continues via the city of Bath, Piercefield on the river Wye, and Penrhyn Castle, in north Wales, both home to absentee West Indian planters, and on into the Scottish Highlands. In the final two chapters, Perry first returns to the Caribbean and then moves on to North America, to explore the familiar ideas of a colonial picturesque style that domesticated the alien landscape, and finally to William Beckford’s ill-fated Fontwell Abbey in Wiltshire. Most of the case studies are already well known to those familiar with the topic, while Piercefield, perhaps the least familiar, is covered in Perry’s early essay on the subject in Slavery and the British Country House (2013). The accessible and engaging text invites the reader directly to visit these places, to explore Bath and its hinterland of football pitches, cemeteries, and hedges, or to accompany Perry “on a beautiful afternoon in late spring” (61) clockwise around the state rooms at Harewood House. The style adds to the sense of the book as a domestic tour. Perry succeeds in connecting the British Atlantic trade to its merchants and landowners, and to the glittering houses and landscaped parks that they commissioned.

Perry argues that the wealth generated by the British Atlantic trade funded some of the most important developments of the eighteenth century, including country houses and the western ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Whitehaven, and Glasgow, as well as resorts such as Bath. Dotted across the hinterlands of these thriving centers were the country seats of the successful merchants turned landowners, who bought up land for its financial security and associated social status, adopting the very latest architectural styles and patronizing up and coming craftspeople and designers. Perry, unusually, goes to some lengths to explain that turnpike roads were an important part of the improvements these landowners invested in. Her interest in turnpikes relates to her argument that the profits of slavery directly influenced the change in British landscape aesthetics by drawing influential commentators and tourists to the west of Britain, where the thrill of the picturesque and sublime in the uplands of the Lake District, north Wales, and eventually the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, replaced the dull predictability of “Capability” Brown’s landscapes. This assertion is arguably where Perry goes beyond the work of others, yet the evidence she provides leaves significant doubts around the causal relationship between the two. She deploys the authors Edmund Burke and William Gilpin to make her case, but the wider context of the ongoing continental wars or, latterly, Napoleon’s continental blockade, receives less attention as a driver for the domestic tour and the gradual development from the picturesque to the sublime. Perry’s interest in the role of improvements and changing aesthetics and tourism would have made an interesting discussion of the so-called Picturesque Controversy of the late eighteenth century, during which Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight, and the landscape designer Humphry Repton crossed swords over many of the same issues. This book reads and feels like a personal journey; the author shares her revelations with the reader. The reader joins Perry as the imprint of Britain’s colonial past is slowly revealed at the various sites and landscapes which feature in the book. Its academic credentials stem from the underpinning Ph.D. thesis, but in such a rapidly expanding and interdisciplinary subject area, there are omissions that leave one wishing for greater depth and a more critical eye. The combination erodes the sense that this will make a critical contribution to the studies of colonialism. Perry relies on secondary sources and a collection of printed primary sources to craft her story, but the interdisciplinary nature of the subject is missing. The discussion of landscape change in the Caribbean and in Britain seems oblivious to landscape studies, preferring the geographical or art historical; specific works such as John E. Crowley’s Imperial Landscapes: Britain’s Global Visual Culture, 1745–1820 (2011) and Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011) are absent.

The discussion of Piercefield House near Chepstow in Monmouthshire, to which the author has a particular connection, perhaps merited a more detailed examination as it is less well-known than the other case studies, and it could have provided an important contribution to the wider debate. Elsewhere, one area where it would have been interesting to see a more nuanced explication is perhaps the nature of investment in the Caribbean, which is characterized here as a source of unending wealth, despite the many well-documented financial failures as investors contended with the unfamiliar tropical environment and the risks inherent in a fluid and unregulated financial system. The inhuman and brutal treatment of the enslaved workers is sometimes rather distant, too.

Perry’s work is a welcome example of how the wealth extracted from the Caribbean, the Americas, and Africa was embedded within the British economy and society from an early date, albeit solely through the lens of the country house. Tearing down statues of individuals who profited misses the wider point that, in truth, colonial wealth was the lifeblood of the entire economy and touched the lives of everyone, from workers in northern woollen mills to Jane Austen in Farnham, Surrey. This book is a step on the road to that realization for a broader audience that might not usually engage with academic studies.