Handbook

Bored with Australian history? Don’t be. Colonial Australia was much more than a distant Gulag. In this course, you will see how this bizarre imperial experiment is central to understanding the transformation of the nineteenth-century world. Australia led the dramatic pan-imperial shift from self-government to autocracy in the aftermath of the American Revolution – a shift that fundamentally changed what it meant to be a British subject everywhere. The (largely illegal) explosion of Australian pastoralism, accompanied by the massive and sudden dispossession of Aboriginal Australians, was part of a global settler boom that fed Britain’s and America’s industrialisation and global sway. That same boom helped, by mid-century, to transform the convict gulag into one of the world’s most inclusive democracies – a social laboratory that inspired reform around the world for good and evil. Join us to learn what Australia’s implausible nineteenth-century history teaches us about nineteenth-century imperial and global history.