Australia’s Northern Shield? Papua New Guinea and the Defence of Australia since 1880 (original) (raw)

2018, Australian Historical Studies

View related articles View Crossmark data ties the competing spectres of British imperial historiography into this drama of intra-imperial discord. The 'gentlemanly capitalists' of Peter J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins fame clashed with Australia's emerging populist, anti-migrant, Anglo-Saxon, working-class identity found in James Belich's 'settlerism'. For the former, the Chinese 'coolie' represented a ready-made solution to the perennial 'labour question' of tropical colonial development, as well as a means to further open China to British investment. For the latter, Chinese migration was an existential threat to the coalescing white 'digger' identity of the colonies. As the gentlemanly capitalists and settlers quarrelled over the utility/threat of 'John Chinaman', John Gallagher's and Ronald Robinson's 'official mind' struggled in vain to achieve an intra-imperial compromise. By amalgamating the major veins of Britain's settler and informal imperial historiographies, Mountford provides fresh insights into what Vincent Harlow described as the 'dichotomy between a system of oceanic trade and settler colonies' (p. 5). Although Mountford extensively employs English-language archival material, the lack of any Chinese-language sources undermines the work's broader transnational appeal. While the author readily acknowledges that the work 'does not pretend to offer a definitive account of Chinese perspectives', the absence of Qing sources means that the catalyst for the Afghan Affair, the Chinese themselves, are primarily represented through the Orientalized gaze of Anglo-Australian contemporary commentators (p. xvii). Given this dearth of Qing sources, the work serves more as an intra-imperial history of the Chinese question than a truly trans-imperial labour history incorporating Britain, China, and colonial Australia. Despite the absence of Chinese language sources, Mountford's Britain, China and Colonial Australia is a significant contribution to the historiography of the British Empire and will certainly be of interest to those examining the intersection of intra-and inter-imperial relations from a broader trans-imperial perspective. The work also highlights the need for a transimperial approach to Asia-Pacific history that examines the perennial struggle between colonial and imperial interests via the intersection of race, labour, migration, and border control.