Australia’s approach to its biosecurity and borders has always been two-pronged – quarantine first, vaccination second. This article asks what this combination looked like in practice by exploring two neglected smallpox vaccination campaigns directed towards Indigenous peoples in the early twentieth century. We argue these were important campaigns because they were the first two pre-emptive, rather than reactionary, vaccination programs directed towards First Nations people. Second, both episodes occurred in Australia’s northern coastline, where the porous maritime geography and proximity to Southeast Asia posed a point of vulnerability for Australian health officials. While smallpox was never endemic, (though epidemic), in Australia, it was endemic at various times and places across Southeast Asia. This shifting spectre of smallpox along the northern coastline was made even more acute for state and federal health officials because of the existing polyethnic relationships, communities, and economies. By vaccinating Indigenous peoples in this smallpox geography, they were envisioned and embedded into a ‘hygienic’ border for the protection of white Australia, entwining the two-prongs as one approach. In this article, we place public health into a recent scholarship that has ‘turned the map upside down’ to re-spatialise Australia’s history and geography to the north and its global connections, while demonstrating how particular coastlines and their connections were drawn into a national imaginary through a health lens.

T. R. Malthus was deeply interested in how his principle of population operated in societies distant to, and different from, his own. In this respect, China served as an intriguing case, already famous in his own time for its large and dense population and the central regulation of a closed economy. Malthus drew on both centuries-old Jesuit material and recent accounts from the Macartney embassy to the Qianlong emperor to assess its past and present food–land–population dynamics. This article explores Malthus's interest in China in the context of British public and private commercial interest in opening its trade, not least interest from his own East India Company. Historiographically, Malthus's China has been critiqued as an early rendition of orientalist demographic transition, posing a dichotomy of East/West fertility and mortality change. In disagreement with this interpretation, this article argues Malthus's key distinction was not East/West but Old World/New World.

The following exchange was the result of ongoing informal conversations among the contributors, who are all, in different ways, interested in the emergent concept of the Anthropocene and the challenges it posed, and the opportunities it provided, for historians working on Britain and the world. The conversation began at the end of 2015 and continued for about a year.

In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world history-writing. Collapsing the land/sea couplet is useful and ‘terraqueous’ history serves world historians well. The term returns the ‘globe’ to global history, it signals sea as well as land as claimable territory, and in its compound construction foregrounds the history and historiography of meeting places. If the Vere Harmsworth Chair of Imperial and Naval History has recently turned from ‘imperial’ into ‘world’ history, so might its ‘naval’ element become terraqueous history in the twenty-first century.

From the 1880s, states and self-governing colonies in North and South America, across Australasia, and in southern Africa began introducing laws to regulate the entry of newly defined “undesirable immigrants.” This was a trend that intensified exclusionary powers originally passed in the 1850s to regulate Chinese migration, initially in the context of the gold rushes in California and the self-governing colony of Victoria in Australia. The entry and movement of other populations also began to be regulated toward the end of the century, in particular the increasing number of certain Europeans migrating to the United States. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Britain followed this legal trend with the introduction of the 1905 Aliens Act, although it was a latecomer when situated in the global context, and certainly within the context of its own Empire. The Aliens Act was passed in response to the persecution of Eastern European Jews and their forced migration, mainly from the Russian Empire into Britain. It defined for the first time in British law the notion of the “undesirable immigrant,” criteria to exclude would-be immigrants, and exemptions from those exclusions. The Aliens Act has been analyzed by historians and legal scholars as an aspect of the history of British immigration law on the one hand, and of British Jewry and British anti-Semitism on the other. Exclusion based on ethnic and religious grounds has dominated both analyses. Thus, the Act has been framed as the major antecedent to Britain's more substantial and enduring legislative moves in the 1960s to restrict entry, regulate borders, and nominate and identify “undesirable” entrants effectively (if not explicitly) on racial grounds.