University of Sydney

Graduate Student, History

Thesis Title: Colonial Citizens: Anti-Transportation, Settler Capitalism and the Constitutional Lobby in Australia and the Cape Colony, 1846-54

About

My thesis examines a brief but crucial passage of political agitation and lobbying for constitutional reforms in the British settler antipodes of Australia and the Cape Colony, South Africa. Demands for greater colonial autonomy there were buoyed by the groundswell of opposition to convict transportation measures introduced by Britain’s Secretary for War and the Colonies, Earl Grey. Taking on the moral discourse of contagion, colonists wrote petitions, initiated boycotts and met at public rallies to denounce the perceived threat convictism held against free emigration to the colonies and the desired image of colonial civic responsibility. Spearheading such action was the Anti-Convict Association in the Cape Colony and the Australasian Anti-Transportation League. In the context of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, and relative political calm in Britain, the colonies were seedbeds for debates over the future of colonial enfranchisement. The thesis thus explores networks for colonial reform and its reception and support in Britain, notions of colonial citizenship and its appeal to British ‘liberty’, as well as the struggle to define the economic (and racial) basis upon which semi-autonomous settler polities would be forged.