The Imperial Commonwealth - (Studies in Imperialism) by Wm Matthew Kennedy (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Imperial Commonwealth examines what empire meant to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian settler colonists, how it seemed to entail special obligations for white settlers of British heritage, and how, in developing settler colonial categories of empire, Australian itself became an empire.

Book Synopsis

From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Australian settler colonists mobilised their unique settler experiences to develop their own vision of what 'empire' was and could be. Reinterpreting their histories and attempting to divine their futures with a much heavier concentration on racialized visions of humanity, white Australian settlers came to believe that their whiteness as well as their Britishness qualified them for an equal voice in the running of Britain's imperial project. Through asserting their case, many soon claimed that, as newly minted citizens of a progressive and exemplary Australian Commonwealth, white settlers such as themselves were actually better suited to the modern task of empire. Such a settler political cosmology with empire at its center ultimately led Australians to claim an empire of their own in the Pacific Islands, complete with its own, unique imperial governmentality.

From the Back Cover

Challenging conventional historiographies that claim empire served only to hamper Australia's national development, The imperial Commonwealth demonstrates that many Australians came to view Britain's empire not simply as a Greater British world state presided over by London, but as a global, ultramarine republic in which Australian settlers were co-equals.

Australian settlers developed their own distinct categories for evaluating, criticizing, and claiming empire based on settler logics that often placed race above gender, class, or nationality. Drawing on Australia's many settler periodicals and official records, the book argues that this vision shaped Australian colonial understandings of the means and ends of their own settler colonialism. It came to define their relationship with Britain and motivated them to forge new transimperial connections with other settler and subject colonies in the Pacific, Africa, and South Asia through technology, humanitarianism, and military endeavour. By formulating, challenging, refining, and ultimately translating their ideal of empire into colonial culture, politics, and law, Australian settler colonists transformed the Commonwealth into an empire in its own right.

The imperial Commonwealth draws together for the first time several underutilized archives and emerging literatures to produce a new imperial history of Australia. It places Australian settler colonialism in a broader imperial context while differentiating Australia's categories for understanding the imperial world from London's.

About the Author

Wm. Matthew Kennedy was recently a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and is now a Research Associate at the University of Sussex