James Henry Lawrence (26 February 1773 – 17 September 1840) was a British writer. He is known for his utopian novel The Empire of the Nairs, or the Rights of Women, which appeared in English in 1811. It was influenced by the political writing of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
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Life
Lawrence was born in London on 26 February 1773 and baptised at Marylebone on 6 March, the eldest of the five sons of Richard James Lawrence (1745–1830), an absentee slave-owner of Fairfield, Jamaica, and his wife Mary Hall (1747–1815), who had been born on the Worcester plantation in Saint James Parish, Jamaica, and later sat as a model for Benjamin West.
He was educated at Eton College from 1782 to 1790, where he was chosen as Montem poet in 1790, and matriculated at the University of Göttingen on 17 July 1791, together with his father and his brother Charles; he completed his studies at Brunswick in 1792.
Lawrence led an itinerant life, mainly in continental Europe. In 1803, in France with his father, he was arrested, along with other English residents and tourists, and was detained for several years at Verdun. He escaped by passing himself off as an Austrian. He received compensation for the Fairfield estate, under the Slave Compensation Act 1837.