The British government established its New South Wales colony in 1788, five years after recognizing the independence of the United States of America. As James Belich writes in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783–1939 (2009), at that time, “two Anglo metropolises,” the British Isles and the United States, lay on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the century between the Napoleonic wars and World War I, the effects of lower trade barriers and reduced transport costs combined to transform the world economy. As the volume of world trade increased, and new regions were opened up to white settlement to supply food and raw materials, Britain and the eastern United States became emigrant societies. New technologies that improved communications and military firepower gave Europeans increasing power to enter markets in Asia and Africa where trading activity had traditionally been restricted. Since 1757, the Qing government had allowed Western traders to access only Canton (Guangzhou); after the Opium Wars (1839–42), Britain forced open five Chinese ports, where British law protected traders, and established a colony at Hong Kong. By the end of the 1830s, the wool industry was thriving in Australia, and from new colonial capitals, pastoral activity spread over the grasslands of what are now Victoria, South Australia, and southern Queensland. As Benjamin Mountford observes in this excellent book, Sydney and Canton had a common purpose, as beachheads for British commercial activity in large, distant continents.
The theme of Britain, China, and Colonial Australia is the evolving position of Australia as a point of interaction between two empires in the first century after white settlement. The relationship between Britain and China was a complex one. The Australian colonies served as imperial bases that supplied raw materials for British industry, and outlets for British migration and investment; Britain's commercial links to China encouraged the search for Australian products to sell to Chinese consumers, to help offset a large trade deficit. As in California in 1848, the Australian gold rushes in 1851 prompted a wave of Chinese immigration, which brought issues of race to the fore. For the white population, the mobility of the Chinese, their numbers, and the perceived threat they posed to competition in labor markets hardened racial attitudes. While British foreign policy in East Asia was built on free access to foreign ports, colonial governments regulated migration from British ports in China. In 1888, the arrival in Melbourne of the SS Afghan from Hong Kong, with 268 Chinese passengers, revealed a conflict between Australia's identity as a British society, and its position as part of Britain's identity as a commercial and imperial power in the Asia-Pacific region. Subsequent legislation in the Australian colonies closed the door to Chinese immigration, thus overriding British imperial and foreign considerations. By 1899, the Australian and New Zealand colonies restricted immigration through use of an education test; the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was the first piece of legislation considered by Australian federal parliament.
In considering this broad and important topic, Mountford moves skillfully across a range of sources. Using company archives, he provides a strong and detailed account of early Sydney-based trade and merchant activity with China, adding depth to existing knowledge of the Canton trade and the subsequent development of Treaty Ports. Then follows an excellent account of the transforming effect of the gold rushes, in particular the thriving trade in passengers from along the Chinese coast to Hong Kong, then to San Francisco and Melbourne. In subsequent chapters, Mountford draws largely on official records, correspondence, and private papers to track the changing links between three continents. In doing so, he provides perspective and context to support a rich narrative. Mountford is fair and generous to other scholars, and provides useful references, helped by the publisher's decision to use footnotes rather than endnotes. Generally, the book reads very well, although at times Mountford lapses into excessively long paragraphs, even when it is clear where a paragraph break is needed.
This is an ambitious and effective book that adds to the growing body of literature on the history of the Pacific. Mountford's vision and depth enriches and extends Geoffrey Blainey's classic The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australian History (1966). It may also be read with profit alongside the comparable work of another rising scholar, Kornel S. Chang, whose recent book Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (2012) considers the effects of American and European imperialism in Asia on the capitalist development of the American West.
