William Francis Butler, who wrote extensively about his travels through British colonial possessions during his military career, warrants attention for his detailed, often compassionate depictions of the lands he visited and peoples he encountered. Following the youthful militaristic passion expressed in his early writings, the more mature Butler presented in his later works a concern about the negative environmental and cultural effects that English colonization visited upon those vast, uninhabited lands and indigenous peoples. His childhood experiences as an Irish Catholic and his experiences with the cultures of Native Americans in North America and of the Dutch colonials and Africans in South Africa during times of intense Anglo-American and European expansion gave Butler a sense of the injustices caused by imperialistic settlement in the late nineteenth century.

His growing anger at insidious British colonial policies, however, never completely replaced his fervent chastising of that government for its failure...