This chapter focuses on a logic of uneven contact with the imperial world-system through a study of upper-class pursuits of adventure, celebrity and capital. The activities of well-heeled elites within Britain’s spheres of imperial influence—including the African interior, Asia, South America and Egypt—are analysed through contextual, formal and thematic readings of Hardy’s Two on a Tower (1882), “The Waiting Supper” (1888) and “The Spectre of the Real” (1894), a tale co-authored with Florence Henniker. Uniting the many examples of upper-class involvements in the empire are patriarchal conceits that adversely affect the lives of women in Hardy’s semi-periphery. The negative impacts register in physical and financial tyrannies—even from afar—and in thwarted cross-class marriages. Female and working-class critiques of empire’s chief exemplars include exposure of their exploration charades, the conquest of male spaces, resistance to austerity, and other kinds of uncompromising assertiveness. Semi-peripheral rejoinders are likewise recorded in rejections of the kinds of debasing representations of colonial indigenous cultures that circulated in the late nineteenth century through iconic ‘Africanist’ writings. The following study includes comparative assessments of the African imaginary in Hardy’s Two on a Tower, Rider Haggard’s African romances, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) and the diary records of David Livingstone.