Book Reviews economic interests firmly in mind. Rather than serving as Utopian spaces of freedom and self-government, the colonies were governed on the basis of white paternalism with the aim of making large commercial profits from the production of sugar, cotton, tobacco and other "West India produce" (111). It is no surprise, therefore, that the Sierra Leone colony degenerated into a large-scale production plant based on something very akin to slave labour and that Freetown was dubbed by its

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... nhabitants "A Town of Slavery" (107-8). Whilst Coleman argues for a distinctive "romantic" period of colonization spanning the years 1776-1799, I left the book wondering whether this was really just a period of imperial colonization legitimated ideologically by recourse to Utopian themes. This having been said, I have no hesitation in recommending this book to Utopian scholars, especially those interested in eighteenth-century Utopian thought and practice.