Unsettled Subjects - Race, Mobility Colonial Citizenship in Australian Settler Colonies

Lying between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australia served as a crossroads for trade and migration across the British Empire. Australia's settler colonies were not only subject to British immigration but were also the destination of emigration from Asia and 'Asia Minor' on terms of both permanent settlement and fixed indenture. Amanda Nettelbeck argues that these unique patterns shaped nineteenth-century debates about the relationship of the settler colonies to a porous empire. She explores how intersecting concerns around race and mobility - two of the most enduring concerns of nineteenth-century governance - changed the terms of British subjecthood and informed the possibilities of imagined colonial citizenship. European mobility may have fuelled the invasive spread of settler colonialism and its notion of transposed 'Britishness', but non-European forms of mobility also influenced the terms on which new colonial identities could be made.

List of contents

Part I. British Subjects and Others in a Porous Empire (1835-1855): 1. Restructuring the empire after slavery; 2. Fashioning the empire's newest subjects: Indigenous and indentured peoples in the imperial gaze; 3. Bridging the settler and plantation colonies: Indian labour emigration and the politics of settlerism; 4. Governing British subjects and 'others': the Chinese diaspora in the British Asia Pacific; 5. Everyday citizens: colonial civic life in the age of settler sovereignty; Part II. Citizenship Practices in the Settler State (1870-1903); 6. Mobile citizens: 'mobility sovereignty', settler domesticity and the hawker debates; 7. De facto citizens: accessing justice in the settler state.

About the author

Amanda Nettelbeck is Professor of History at the University of Adelaide. Her last book Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood (2019) won the 2020 Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society Legal History Prize. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Product details

• Authors: Amanda (University of Adelaide) Nettelbeck, Nettelbeck Amanda
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 30.11.2025
• EAN: 9781009489430
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0948943-0
• No. of pages: 300
• Series: Critical Perspectives on Empire
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, Australia, British Empire, Commonwealth of Nations, c 1800 to c 1900, Colonialism & imperialism, Indigenous Peoples, Migration, immigration & emigration, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General, Migration, immigration and emigration, Australasian & Pacific history, Colonialism and imperialism, Australasian and Pacific history, The Commonwealth, 1821–1903 (period of the Union of Columbia and Panama), Relating to First Nations peoples in Australia