The emergence of Australian settler capitalism in the nineteenth century and the disintegration/integration of Aboriginal societies: hybridisation and local evolution within the world market

Abstract

Australian settler capitalism emerged under the tutelage of the British state, which permitted the blending of public interest and private property, within an imperial geopolitical and capitalist dynamic, in the early nineteenth century. The landmass of Australia was more or less 'cleared' over time of impediments to extractive, land-extensive, capitalist pastoralism and agriculture and the Aboriginal inhabitants were marginalised and decimated. The greatest barrier, however, to unfettered capitalist accumulation within the settler mode of production - in Australia as elsewhere - was that of labour, as Wakefield (1929) and Marx (1996) understood. Labour was soon scarce, especially when convictism ended, and far from homogenous and those searching for suitable low-cost and preferably servile supplies roamed across the world. Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australians managed to remain as a living presence in the frontier districts, despite the ravages of disease and violence, but with negligible incorporation into capitalist relations until the late nineteenth century and then in very limited contexts. Suitable supplies of proletarianised wage labour came as immigrants.