Angela Woollacott. Settler Society in the Australian Colonies

In Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture, Angela 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. The first two chapters reveal how networks of kinship and migration sprawled expansively across the British Empire, forming tangible, personal links between enterprises of land settlement, colonial experimentation, administrative rule, and military power in different localities. In chapter 3, Woollacott demonstrates the sheer scale and consistency of the exploitation of non-white labor across all the Australian colonies, which she argues has been paradoxically downplayed in a proliferation of local specific studies of the deployment of Aboriginal, Indian, Chinese, or Pacific Islander laborers. In this and three succeeding chapters, she shows how colonial demands for “responsible” government rested on understandings of manly authority that were inextricably entangled with settler men’s experience as masters of labor, citizens of empire, patriarchal heads of household, and agents of frontier violence. Her final chapter traces the connections of ideas and ideologies across empire through a careful examination of the perspective of Australian settlers on imperial wars raging elsewhere: specifically in India and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s. Throughout the book, Woollacott insistently draws attention to links between empire, work, land, gender, race, political citizenship, and family.

British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · Frontier · Government (linguistics) · Ideology · Imperial unit system · Indigenous · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies