Imperial expectations and realities : El Dorados, utopias and dystopias / edited by Andrekos Varnava.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

El Dorados, utopias and dystopias in imperialism and colonial settlement / Andrekos Varnava -- Darién and the psychology of Scottish adventurism in the 1690s / Eric Richards -- Greek expectations : Britain and the Ionian Islands, 1815-64 / Leslie Rogne Schumacher -- Bambuk gold : General Faidherbe's Senegalese chimera / Leland Conley Barrows -- Salubrity and the survival of the Swan River Colony : health, climate and settlement in colonial Western Australia / Ruth A. Morgan -- Germany's El Dorado in the Pacific : metropolitan representations and colonial realities, 1884-1914 / Holger Droessler -- A place to speak the 'language of heaven' ? Patagonia as land of broken Welsh promise / Trevor Harris -- Between heaven and earth : the German Templer colonies in Palestine / Matthew P. Fitzpatrick and Felicity Jensz -- Italy's sexual El Dorado in Africa / Daniela Baratieri -- Dreaming in the desert : Libya as Italy's promised land, 1911-70 / Giuseppe Finaldi --The British Mesopotamian El Dorado : the restoration of the Garden of Eden / Ann Matters -- Shattered images : French Indochina as a failed symbolic resource / John Hennessey.

This volume explores how imperial powers established and expanded their empires through decisions that were often based on exaggerated expectations and wishful thinking, rather than on reasoned and scientific policies. It uses case studies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and incorporates imperial traditions including Scottish, British, French, German, Italian and American. Various colonial spaces are considered, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas, and in doing so, the contributors offer new insights into the nature of imperialism and colonial settlement. The book does not try to explain the broader motives of imperialism and colonial settlement, but instead focuses on understanding these ventures, in which unrealistic arguments were made that justified imperial and colonial interventions and envisaged rapid success. Such cases proved illusory and sometimes disastrous, and thus serve as tools for demystifying imperial policy. These bad decisions were often twisted and turned to justify them differently, and there was a great reluctance to admit a flawed or failed policy, let alone reverse it. Imperial expectations and realities will prove useful to academics and students at all levels, and in a variety of specialisms within history, but particularly in comparative imperialism and colonialism, and policy studies.

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