In the period 1700-1850, the history of utopian thought cast light on ideas of property-holding, community, and social and political reform movements, including those for the extension of rights to slaves, women and animals. Much of the later programme of communitarian communism later associated with early socialism was outlined first in utopian form, and utopian works may help us to plot the development of republican ideas of an agrarian law towards 19th-century socialism. At the same time, satires of primitivist critiques of luxury and the extension of commercial society make up one part of the anti-utopian branch of the tradition. This text includes some of the best-known utopian tracts of the period, drawn from a large number of libraries. It includes: Defoe’s supplements to Robinson Crusoe , which cast light on the seminal works of the period by Edmund Burke, Samual Johnson and Benjamin Disraeli; prominent socialist works, such as John Francis Bray’s A Voyage to Utopia ; satires on socialism, such as The Island of Liberty and Equality ; and the early feminist novel of the time, James Lawrence’s The Empire of the Nairs .