John Barrow, the Quarterly Review’s Imperial Reviewer – J. M. R Cameron

John Barrow (1764-1848), traveller, author, colonial administrator, in uential member of the Royal Society, co-founder of the Royal Geographical Society and Second Secretary to the Admiralty for forty years, was a major contributor to the Quarterly Review, writing more than two hundred articles between 1809 and 1841, three quarters of them while Gi ord and Coleridge were editors. In a widely repeated anecdote written one year before his death, Barrow attributed his involvement to an invitation from George Canning, then Foreign Secretary, and his subsequent discussion with Gi ord. When Barrow o ered to review LouisChrétien de Guignes’s recently published account of his experiences in east Asia while he was the French representative in Canton (1784-1800),1 Gi ord agreed readily as ‘it is one at your ngers ends, and one that few know anything about … and I am gasping for something new’.