These years saw the emergence of several writers for whom race and gender were related concerns: Mary Shelley, Mary Butt Sherwood and Matthew Lewis are discussed here by Joseph W. Lew, Moira Ferguson, and D. L. Macdonald. The period brought the formal abolition of the slave-trade (1807) and a subsequent rise in illegal slave smuggling. It saw the development of missionary societies and the increasing influence of colonial government by Evangelical precepts. After 1815 successive governors-general vastly expanded British rule in India and in 1828 the then Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, introduced a comprehensive policy of ‘Westernization’, instituting English as the official language of law, administration, and education, and outlawing Indian customs such as sati.

Britain became the colonial power in Malta and the Mediterranean, giving Coleridge first-hand experience of colonial administration. Colonialist interest also expanded to the West: the discovery and subsequent conquest and government of the South American tribes was a popular subject for poetry in the period. Helen Maria Williams's long poem Peru (1786) had told the story of Pizarro's conquest of the Incas; Joel Barlow glorified the Inca state in The Vision of Columbus (1787) and R. B. Sheridan adapted Koetzebue's Pizarro (1799) for the London stage. Advised by Samuel Rogers and Robert Southey, William Lisle Bowles described Spanish rapacity in Chile in The Missionary (1811–13). This poem developed the sentimental topoi of Williams's Peru.