This course explores the manifold, uneasy relationships between Romanticism and technology, a word in the process of taking on its current meanings during the period. We will focus on steam power in order to understand the modes of modernity that emerged from Romanticism's coal-fueled global and imperial history. From Joanna Baillie’s "Address to a Steam Vessel" and William Wordsworth's "Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways" to P.B. Shelley's "Letter to Maria Gisborne," and Thomas De Quincey's "The English Mail-Coach," Romantic writing grappled with "the all-changing power of steam." The phrase comes from an essay in the Asiatic Journal, in which the eponymous "Returned Exile" remarks that "the all-changing power of steam has performed its metamorphoses in India as well as in Europe." We will follow these metamorphoses to early British India, where a spate of speculative fictions appeared, tracing utopian and dystopian futures: H. Goodeve’s "1980" introduces its characters "of all colors and ranks" as passengers on "the Himalaya steam mail," while in H. M. Parker's "The Junction of the Oceans. [A Tale of the Year 2074.]," a project to cut a canal across Panama and let steam ships navigate between the Atlantic and Pacific unleashes a flood that destroys the world.