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Settler Society in the Australian Colonies

Self-Government and Imperial Culture

Angela Woollacott author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:5th Mar '15

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Settler Society in the Australian Colonies cover

The 1820s to the 1860s were a foundational period in Australian history, arguably at least as important as Federation. Industrialization was transforming Britain, but the southern colonies were pre-industrial, with economies driven by pastoralism, agriculture, mining, whaling and sealing, commerce, and the construction trades. Convict transportation provided the labour on which the first settlements depended before it was brought to a staggered end, first in New South Wales in 1840 and last in Western Australia in 1868. The numbers of free settlers rose dramatically, surging from the 1820s and again during the 1850s gold rushes. The convict system increasingly included assignment to private masters and mistresses, thus offering settlers the inducement of unpaid labourers as well as the availability of land on a scale that both defied and excited the British imagination. By the 1830s schemes for new kinds of colonies, based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's systematic colonization, gained attention and support. The pivotal development of the 1840s-1850s, and the political events which form the backbone of this story were the Australian colonies' gradual attainment of representative and then responsible government. Through political struggle and negotiation, in which Australians looked to Canada for their model of political progress, settlers slowly became self-governing. But these political developments were linked to the frontier violence that shaped settlers' lives and became accepted as part of respectable manhood. With narratives of individual lives, Settler Society shows that women's exclusion from political citizenship was vigorously debated, and that settlers were well aware of their place in an empire based on racial hierarchies and threatened by revolts. Angela Woollacott particularly focuses on settlers' dependence in these decades on intertwined categories of unfree labour, including poorly-compensated Aborigines and indentured Indian and Chinese labourers, alongside convicts.

With considerable authority, Angela Woollacott's Settler Society in the Australian Colonies points the way for a new generation ... the book is a concise, useful, fresh, and often original summary of a vast and difficult topic * Alan Atkinson, Australian Book Review *
[This book] is a sketch of Australia but an entirely new and challenging one ... Angela Woollacott makes us glance nervously and desperately about ourselves. She is unravelling our most cherished ideas. This book should be controversial. It needs to be, and we must make it so. * Paula Jane Byrne, Journal of Australian Colonial History *
[a] capacious and original work ... Woollacott shows she is in the vanguard of a wave of Australian historians who are attempting to connect Indigenous dispossession, gender relations and settler politics. * Zoe Laidlaw, Australian Historical Studies *
[Angela Woollacott] has brought the Australian experience into the mainstream of settler colonial studies ... Woollacott has written a stimulating and thought-provoking study of the nature and dynamics of settler colonialism in the southern colonies. It sets an agenda for new research and will prompt historians to re-examine many of their assumptions about colonial society in Australia. * Bernard Attard, Reviews in History *
Woollacott writes an ambitiously integrated history. She stitches microhistories of individuals and families across a broad canvas of British imperial expansion. She draws connections between political, cultural, social, and intimate aspects of Australian settler society. She weaves questions of gender into what is conventionally told as a masculine political story of self-government. And she ties local histories of settler-indigenous relations to a global history of settler colonialism. * Penny Russell, American Historical Review *
This is a new history of an old topic, and one that offers rich, interwoven arguments that draw from many historiographical areas: gender history, the history of colonialism, Australian political history and global history. Readers coming from all directions will find much of value. Woollacott shows convincingly how interrelated discourses of race, gender and the imagined relationship between the colony and the metropole shaped the Australian colonies and, just as importantly, how these discourses can be fully understood only if they are seen as inherently transnational. * Katherine Ellinghaus, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History *

  • Winner of Shortlisted for the University of Southern Queensland History Book Award 2015.

ISBN: 9780199641802

Dimensions: 241mm x 163mm x 19mm

Weight: 508g

240 pages