Writing to England: The study of Antipodean political institutions and formation of Imperial Sentiment, 1870-1900

Abstract

This thesis examines how a range of Australasian politicians, administrators, journalists, and lawyers contested perceptions of the institutions and social relations of their settler colonies which circulated in metropolitan British public opinion. It consists of two overlapping arguments that offer a pathway into thinking about the mutual interconnection of political developments between the settler colonies and metropole of the British Empire.

Through these acts of contestation, these Australasian writers began to develop the foundations of a ‘national’ historical understanding of their respective settler colonies. The explanatory paradigm of this settler-colonial historical understanding was less dependent on an evaluation of how effective ‘English’ institutions had been transplanted in the Australasian colonies, and instead emphasized the development of their own settler-colonial political institutions according to the influence of local contingencies. In furnishing this settler-colonial historical understanding to their British audience, these Australasian writers sought to emphasize what they believed to be the inherently conservative nature of Australasian institutions and social relations.

These Australasian writers had significant experience of the functioning of governance in these settler societies. This ‘colonial experience’ was documented in a range of governmental reports, articles, and books which blended personal knowledge with colonial statistics to demonstrate how the colonial landscape was being made productive. At the core of these accounts of the Australasian settler colonies was a normative settler-political subject, who by the diffusion of property, demonstrated for these Australasian writers the inherently conservative nature of Australasian democracies. The key impact that these writers had on the British political landscape was to offer a pathway of thinking whereby the different constraints acting on the Australasian democracies could potentially reinvigorate English political institutions. As a ‘new’ country, the possibilities for experimentation were far greater, as unlike Britain it was not constrained by the weight of tradition.