Visitors to resorts were enveloped in a new world that had the casino and its pleasures at its core. The novel forms that the institution assumed in the nineteenth century represent a change in the structure as a whole. The casino did important cultural work in the imaginations of nineteenth-century observers, recalling other social spaces, from the court to the church, and offered a contrast to other locations associated with nineteenth-century modernity. The architectural elements that were not directly related to gambling had the subsidiary purpose of keeping people within the physical confines of the building so that they would return to the gambling tables. Nineteenth-century casinos were anchored in attempts to generate and encourage certain forms of middle-class sociability. The casino produced an environment in which the emotions were unmoored, and new sensations attacked any previous emotional core that visitors possessed. Unlike other spaces that channeled emotion – the cathedral or the court – the nineteenth-century casino did so in the service of play, pleasure, and financial gain.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

The introduction sets out the intent of the book, an overview of the major works in the field, and a view of the arguments appearing in each chapter. Gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Studying casino gambling provides a way to see how nineteenth-century Europeans understood their changing world, even as it also reflected those changes itself. In this way gambling was used in an explanatory capacity, one that let contemporaries probe the inner workings of the machine and the creation of knowledge. If we want to understand the intricate dance of society, culture, politics, and ideas, then gambling is a useful tool to pry open these different stories, allowing us to see better large historical transformations.

In descriptions of the interior drama of the wager, or of the game, or of the convoluted sequence of emotions suddenly untethered and allowed free expression, we see not only the ways that gambling generated emotional intensity in players, but also how it invited closely detailed descriptions of the ways emotions were experienced. Play and the creation of Blanc-style casinos created a social space and a set of images of gambling that provided Europeans from differing backgrounds a common language of emotion that was developed through a discussion of the ways that emotion was contained and expressed in the environment of the casino, an entity typically described as being passionless.

Gambling in this period was never just about gambling; it always represented something else or spoke to some bigger set of concerns. It was thought to be a neutered form of aggression, made socially acceptable through the relentless power of the civilizing process but flowering in the novel context of the resort casino. Gambling was a way to connect to prior forms of existence, and it functioned as a substitute for socially unacceptable practices. Gambling is also contrasted with other forms of risk: insurance and speculation. Some observers took a pro-gambling approach, noting the unique skills it cultivates or its basis in nature.

Nineteenth-century European casinos tapped into new transportation and communication networks, and they were flexible enough to take advantage of the changing political map of Europe. The casinos found success amid these large structural transformations affecting the continent. They projected a new type of sociability that exuded a sense of exclusivity and democracy at once. The casino was also an environment that embraced social mixture. The casino attracted a transnational and polyglot clientele. Nineteenth-century casinos were physical expressions of contemporary ideas about fate and agency. The nineteenth-century casino also occasioned a prolonged discussion of the body, feeling, and mind, and there is a wide recognition of culture’s impact on the body. Seeing the effect that gambling had on players, nineteenth-century observers could consider how the self, the environment, and behavior all related to one another.

TO a person who has perused the foregoing pages much need not be said upon this subject; for, after such a series of error, of folly, and of imbecility, success, rather than failure, must have produced astonishment.

I shall however endeavour to collect into one point of view the principal causes of our miscarriage, and this with a view of proving that our want of success was not owing to the impracticability, or difficulty, of the enterprise, but to the measures pursued by its proposers and conductors.

In the 1st place the season was too far advanced when our proposals were first published; (the 9th of Nov. 1791) for if none of those unforeseen delays, which afterwards took place, had happened, we should not have been able to have taken possession of the island more than two months earlier than we actually did; which would not have been many days prior to the commencement of the rainy season; whereas the best time to have arrived at the island would have been about the middle of November, when we should have had certainly more than six months dry weather, in which to have erected habitations and cleared ground.

The next wrong step was the increasing of the number of the members of the committee, or council, to conduct the enterprize; for though I do not mean to say that any individual who was afterwards added to it was the principal cause of our failure, and much less do I mean to aver that any one of the six original proposers of the undertaking discovered either energy or talents sufficient to secure its success, yet, increasing their numbers, without adding any thing to their ability, was increasing the means, and the probability of weak measures and disunited counsels. Moreover, those who were afterwards added to it did not carry with them exactly the same views and intentions which governed the first proposers. I think therefore that it would have been much better to have left the management of the undertaking to the latter only; and the probability of succeeding would have been increased had they been reduced to three; and much more so, had one person only had the direction: for, I am fully convinced that in enterprizes of this kind the direction should be left to one. He should have full power; and should be responsible for the use of it.

In 1805, naval officer Captain Philip Beaver (1766–1813) published his African Memoranda: Relative to an Attempt to Establish a British Settlement on the Island of Bulama, on the Western Coast of Africa, in the Year 1792. His book, which forms the basis of this edition, provides an account of the extraordinary migration of 275 men, women, and children to Bolama, a relatively unknown island in the Bissagos Archipelago off the coast of Guinea-Bissau. Leaving England in April 1792 to set up a colony on the island, a year and a half later almost half the colonists were dead and the rest had returned home. The story of this venture and its melancholy outcome makes up the core of the book. The editorial material (in this introduction and the footnotes to the text) provides information about the people and places that are described, explains in detail the events that took place in establishing the colony, and discusses the Atlantic contexts of the venture at a time when transatlantic slavery was present in Britain and Africa. In doing so this new edition intends to highlight and explain the background and development of a little known, and arguably ill-conceived, attempt, to establish a settlement on the coast of West Africa. As well as seeking new opportunities to better their lives abroad, the colonists intended to demonstrate a socioeconomic model of engagement with Africans that would prove transatlantic slavery was unnecessary. At a time when anti-slavery initiatives were prominent in Britain through the efforts of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (formed in 1787) and the parliamentary campaign for abolition led by William Wilberforce in the late 1780s and early 1790s, the Bolama colonists wanted to engage with the problem of slavery in Africa itself. Their leaders embraced Wilberforce's belief that Britons should expiate themselves for their involvement in the slave trade and make ‘reparation to Africa, as far as we can, by establishing a trade upon true commercial principles’.

IT has been already related that the Calypso separated from us on the night between the 16th and 17th of April, and had arrived at Santa Cruz, the place of rendezvous, on the 4th day of May, from which latter place Mr. Dalrymple immediately sailed, on account of the small-pox being on board, without leaving for us any intimation of a second rendezvous, or his future intentions. At this time they had buried one man, David Cook, a labourer, who died of a consumption, and one child, Mary Williams, who died in convulsions.

Instead of proceeding to Port Praya, in St. Jago, and there waiting several days for the other vessels, as ought to have been done, the Calypso sailed directly for Goree, where they arrived on the evening of the 12th, a place ill calculated to supply the necessities of the colonists, Mr. Dalrymple had been induced to make this choice from an idea that he should there be able to pro-cure a pilot for the Bijuga channel.

Having been able to procure but little water, and less refreshments for the people, the Calypso sailed from Goree on the 19th, and on the 21st anchored in the Bijuga channel. On the 24th she got sight of the island of Bulama, and sent all the boats armed on shore. The next day one of the boats having returned, the ship got under weigh, and proceeded towards that island, where she anchored in the evening.

On the 26th a party of men was missing in the woods, and the next day another party was sent in search of them; some of the missing returned from the woods on the 28th, and the day following the remainder of them much fatigued. Some of them had, whether wantonly or not I am ignorant, set fire to the long dry grass, which spread with much rapidity to a great extent, and continued burning for many hours; in the mean time several of the colonists had erected small huts and tents on shore; parties wandered wherever they pleased in the day, and returned to the ship or not as they thought proper in the evening: in short, nothing could be more irregular or improper than their conduct.

IN consequence of the determination of Messrs. Dalrymple and Beaver, to attempt a settlement on the island of Bulama, they had made known their intentions on that subject to some of their military friends, who eagerly joined in their views, and in a few days the following gentlemen

met at Old Slaughter's Coffee-house, and formed themselves into a society for the purpose of establishing a settlement upon an eligible spot on the western coast of Africa: and, being the original subscribers, constituted themselves a committee to open a subscription, and to form regulations for the purpose of carrying their views into effect.

The island of Bulama, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, on the western coast of Africa, in the 11th degree of north latitude, was the spot fixed upon as the best adapted to the commencement of our undertaking.

We knew that it was uninhabited, and had every reason to believe that there would be no difficulty in purchasing it from those neighbouring chiefs who might claim it as their property; to establish ourselves on an island, instead of on the continent, was thought most eligible, as we should be more secure from any hostile attack, if any quarrel should unfortunately arise with the natives; and quarrels with them would be less likely to occur, as our insular situation would put it out of the power of the colonists to wander into any of the native villages; moreover, Mr. Dalrymple, when serving with his regiment last war, on the island of Goree, had collected much information, relative to this island – its harbours, productions, soil, &c. But what finally induced us to make this choice, was the very favourable account given of it by Mons. De la Brue, who had been director-general of the French Senegal Company, and who had visited this island in the year 1700.