Making Things Economic: Theory and Government in New South Wales, 1788-1863
Date
2018
Authors
Huf, Benjamin
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Publisher
Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University
Abstract
This thesis is a study of the invention and
consolidation of a domain of knowledge and government we today
denominate as the ‘economic’ in the particular context of the
British colonisation of New South Wales. Two lines of argument
are pursued. The first recovers the idea of British imperialism
in New South Wales as an ‘economic’ project, in which
phenomena that have been typically assumed as essential to
colonial development – convict work, land settlement, wool
growing, migration and their impact on Aboriginal societies –
came to be classified, organised and administered as distinctly
economic problems. As imperial and colonial authorities
increasingly appropriated the ‘constitutive metaphors’ of
Ricardian political economy in their reports, inquiries and
correspondence, they re-narrated these phenomena from discrete
problems of state to integrated dynamics of production,
distribution and wealth-accumulation. This economic project is
studied in distinction from, even as it intersected with, the
paradigms of democratisation, settler colonialism and
legal-positivist statism with which historians have tended to
frame the colony’s political and intellectual history in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Its legacies, in the
identities it forged and projects it legitimated, have been as
enduring as the colonial constitution but less closely assessed.
The second line of argument, arising from this reading of
colonial history, revises the significance of nineteenth-century
political economy as an emergent political vocabulary in a
nascent Australian political culture, and in English-speaking
Anglophone culture more generally. In appropriating political
economy as an official discourse, imperial authorities not only
helped insulate the ‘economic’ as a domain of knowledge, but
consolidated a new, reductive framework for interpreting,
governing and debating social interaction, regulated by the
imperatives of supply and demand, profits and wages. Together,
these two lines of argument are offered as a critical exercise in
recovering and recognising the historical functioning of economic
language in official, public and everyday speech. They provide a
fresh perspective on aspects of the colonial past, and recover
legacies which continue to shape our world today.
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Keywords
History of colonial New South Wales, Nineteenth-century British imperialism, History of economic thought
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Thesis (PhD)
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Open Access
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