This chapter outlines the key contours of Australian economic history between 1870 and 2010 in a comparative perspective. Overall, the story it tells is a positive one, in spite of the vexing challenges that Australia has faced. Despite undergoing relative economic decline and a fundamental reorientation in the direction of its trade over this period, Australia emerged into the twenty-first century with its status as one of the world’s most prosperous and advanced societies intact. While numerous challenges remain unresolved, Australia’s experience to date provides a clear-cut example of a society where an abundance of natural resources has proved a blessing rather than a curse. The secret of Australia’s avoidance of the pitfalls that have befallen so many countries similarly blessed appears to lie in the ability of its institutions to adapt successfully in the face of changed circumstances while remaining supportive of innovative and productive activities.

Introduction

This chapter explores a key feature of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century globalisation, namely the emergence of the empire's settler societies as the fastest-growing export market for the British ‘metropole’. Not only did these colonies consume comparatively high levels of British exports, the share of income they devoted to British goods also deepened relative to other parts of the developed and developing world over time. The latter is an intriguing fact with implications for how we perceive the evolution of colonial consumer behaviour prior to the First World War. Most importantly, it suggests a quickening of economic relationships within the British World at this time: a more precise and intensive drawing together of the interests and needs of Britain and its settler colonies. Migrant consumers, it seems, were becoming more, not less, wedded to the British product, as other competing uses for their income, such as the consumption of local or foreign (non-British) goods and services, became available to them. Why, then, did British products fare so well in these markets, and why did colonial consumers, by that time free to buy from anyone in the international marketplace, spend such a large share of their income on them?

We argue that a good part of the answer lies in the rich and layered interconnections that characterised the British World – the ethnic and cultural ties that bound settlers emotionally, financially and spiritually to ‘home’.

‘Empire’ and ‘globalisation’ are currently two of the most prominent and widely debated discourses in the humanities and social sciences. This book explores the historical relationship between them. We take as our starting-point one of the great global movements of population – the largely voluntary emigration of men, women and children from Europe to the New World between the mid nineteenth century and the First World War. While migration may be ‘as old as humanity itself’, it was during these years that the world witnessed an unprecedented exodus of 50 million or so Europeans. Britain led the way, supplying approximately 13.5 million migrants, or a quarter of the total. Aided by improvements in transport and communications, arguably no less dramatic in their ability to transform life than those witnessed over the last half-century, the majority of these British people settled across Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United States.

The consequences of this population outflow were profound. On the one hand, emigration was a force for global economic growth – integrating labour, commodity and capital markets to an extent never previously seen. Yet, on the other, this business of white settlement – for that is was it was, or at least became – led to the widespread dispossession and oppression of indigenous peoples, as well as to a racialisation of the social order, the polarising effects of which were felt powerfully at the time and still resonate today.

Introduction

Migration was deeply woven into the fabric of British life. This was partly a function of numbers: the sheer – and unprecedented – scale of those who left the British Isles. More than that, it points to the fact that many people leaving the ‘old’ country were emphatically not cutting loose. A variety of networks helped migrants not only to move overseas and adapt to their new environments, but, crucially, to stay in touch and involved with the society they had left behind. Migrants, indeed, showed considerable determination and skill in forging and sustaining links to friends and family ‘back home’.

Return migration and modern technology contributed to this developing sense of a relationship between British people ‘at home’ and British peoples overseas. It is estimated that, from 1860 to 1914, as many as 40 per cent of all English emigrants came back to Britain – some two million returnees, each with first-hand knowledge of the colonies or the United States. Some returned for good, others temporarily – to marry someone from their former village, to attend the funerals of loved ones, or simply to see family and old friends. Meanwhile, by taking advantage of the transatlantic telegraph, and fast and reliable postal and remittance services, migrants were able, as never before, to keep abreast of what was happening in the United Kingdom, and to sustain family ties there.

The information that filtered through personal and familial networks was crucial to a migrant's choice of destination.

Introduction

The idea that social connections matter, and can be thought of in networked terms, should startle few scholars. Dubbed a ‘metaphor for our times’, networks are currently given a prominent role in historical and contemporary social analysis, as well as in debates about globalisation. Yet the term ‘network’ tends to be employed rather casually. The technological and social aspects of networks are not always sufficiently differentiated, while networks seemingly encompass an ever-wider range of human activities and forms of interaction. At worst, the network concept serves as little more than a shorthand for human behaviour deemed too collective to be determined by pure individual choice, yet too diffuse and personal to be taken up by formal state or market institutions. There is clearly a danger here. If networks can be taken to mean almost any kind of informal set of interpersonal connections, the term is likely to be too imprecise to have much purchase. As one commentator warns, ‘if everything is a network then nothing is’.

Hence great care is required in assessing the importance of networks as agents of historical change. In the following chapters we explore how a variety of social networks created links between individuals and groups, and how these links in turn facilitated the movement of commodities, money, information and people across national or, more accurately, colonial borders. That said, it must be emphasised at the outset that causative relationships between two phenomena cannot be inferred from spatial and temporal co-existence alone.

At the start of the third millennium, the times are very much a-changing; or at least there are many who would wish us to believe that this is so. ‘Globalisation’ is the word that has been coined to capture this sense of living in an age of transformation – one in which little can be taken for granted and no-one quite knows what the future might bring. ‘Globalisation’ trips off the tongues of journalists and politicians in a way it manifestly did not before, while university libraries now struggle to make space for the swathe of new studies of our globalised world and how it came to be so. Few disciplines in academia have been left untouched by globalisation's claims, or have remained immune to its conceptual allure. Readily translatable into French, Spanish, German and other European languages, ‘globalisation’ is perhaps the pre-eminent way of conceptualising contemporary change. A growing number of sceptics question its novelty, feel frustrated by its lack of specificity and are critical of its Eurocentricity. ‘A messy idea for an anxious world’ is the verdict of one recent commentator upon the concept. Yet there are many more champions of globalisation. Indeed, like the discourse of ‘evolutionism’ in the nineteenth century, globalisation has been readily appropriated for a variety of (often competing) causes. Talk of ‘globality’, ‘global society’, ‘global governance’, ‘global economy’, ‘global justice’, ‘global warming’, the ‘global war against terror’ and a ‘new global order’ is, for the moment, here to stay.

This book has brought together new research in the field of cultural history with long-standing debates about the economics of imperialism. By combining approaches from the humanities and social sciences we have explored the relationship between two key features of the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century world: empire and globalisation. On the face of it, the division of the world into rival empires and the processes of closer international integration would appear to be inherently in conflict. To the extent that rivalry between empires, and violence and oppression within them, have pitted cultures and peoples against each other, this is true. Yet preceding chapters have also shown how the British empire, or more precisely the British World, promoted greater economic and social integration – a force for globalisation, in fact. Such a finding may seem surprising, especially when viewed through the lens of contemporary experience and national sovereignty. We are accustomed to perceive most political phenomena, including globalisation itself, through the framework of the nation state. From that perspective, closer international integration is largely a product of the interplay of different national policies. The unspoken assumption is clear: a society's freedom to make its own way in the global marketplace is contingent upon a prior ability to gain and exert its independence. If we accept this proposition, then such freedom of action cannot be attained within the structures of empire.

Introduction

The twenty-first century belatedly rediscovered empire. The forces of globalisation – with their apparent lack of respect for national borders – have propelled a remarkable revival of interest in our imperial past. Whether perceived as precursors to modern globalisation, or its ‘first wave’, empires are widely believed to hold the key to understanding globalisation's historical roots. As one leading scholar has aptly remarked, what were empires if not ‘transnational organisations … created to mobilise the resources of the world? Their existence and their unity were made possible by supra-national connections. Their longevity was determined by their ability to extend the reach and maintain the stability of these connections.’

This belief that trans-national impulses and ideas were intrinsic to the operations of empire, and had far-reaching historical consequences, goes a long way to explain why consideration of space and place has loomed so large in the ‘new’ imperial history. A ‘radical re-imagining of space and of human relationships to it’ was a concomitant of British expansion overseas. Spatial concepts of empire have, of course, long underpinned writing about Europe's imperial experiences, whether British, French, Dutch, Spanish or Portuguese. Yet it is only relatively recently, after almost half a century of neglect, that the empire's settler societies – those places where indigenous people were dispossessed, and where Europeans came to form a significant part of the population – have begun to be examined more explicitly, and indeed comparatively, by scholars of empire.