Expansion, 1820-50

Abstract

The settlement of Australia on a continental scale was unimaginable in 1820. Yet by 1850 the continent had been transformed by Europeans and their domesticated animals, and the Australian colonies ranked, with other Anglophone settler societies, among the fastest growing economies in history. Rapid expansion in Australia was neither organic nor inevitable. It was contingent on ecological limits and global political and economic contexts, and was contested by imperial and colonial governments, by excluded settlers and, most of all, by Indigenous people.