In 1820, King Radama of Imerina, Madagascar signed a treaty allowing approximately one hundred young Malagasy to train abroad under official British supervision, the so-called 'Madagascar Youths'. In this lively and carefully researched book, Gwyn Campbell traces the Youths' untold history, from the signing of the treaty to their eventual recall to Madagascar. Extensive use of primary sources has enabled Campbell to explore the Madagascar Youths' experiences in Britain, Mauritius and aboard British anti-slave trade vessels, and their instrumental role in the modernisation of Madagascar. Through this remarkable history, Campbell examines how Malagasy-British relations developed, then soured, providing vital context to our understanding of slavery, mission activity and British imperialism in the nineteenth century.

Attending to the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel and its connections with missionary culture, Michelle Elleray investigates how empire was conveyed to Victorian children in popular forms, with a focus on the South Pacific as a key location of adventure tales and missionary efforts. The volume draws on an evangelical narrative about the formation of coral islands to demonstrate that missionary investments in the socially marginal (the young, the working class, the racial other) generated new forms of agency that are legible in the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel, even as that agency was subordinated to Christian values identified with the British middle class. Situating novels by Frederick Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne and W. H. G. Kingston in the periodical culture of the missionary enterprise, this volume newly historicizes British children’s textual interactions with the South Pacific and its peoples. Although the mid-Victorian authors examined here portray British presence in imperial spaces as a moral imperative, our understanding of the "adventurer" is transformed from the plucky explorer to the cynical mercenary through Robert Louis Stevenson, who provides a late-nineteenth-century critique of the imperial and missionary assumptions that subtended the mid-Victorian boys’ adventure novel of his youth.