Endorsements

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.