Nineteenth-Century Canada and Australia: The Paradoxes of Class Formation‪.‬

SO DIFFERENT, yet so alike, Canada and Australia were central to the experience of 19th-century empire. Among the most successful of British colonial dominions, they shared a history of subordination that was itself premised on subjugating aboriginal peoples and establishing complex home markets in labour, resources, and indigenous industrial development. Championed as the virtuous success story of white settler societies, these garrisons of the northern and southern hemispheres have long been associated with the economics of the staple and the politics of a peculiarly British imperial evolutionism in which the march from "colony to nation" was characterized by gradualism and the slow germination of responsible government. Peopled by convicts and loyalists, Irish immigrants and half-pay soldiers, these distant lands were nevertheless connected by the ties of rebellion and restraint, some of those transported to Australia and Tasmania having been exiled from Upper and Lower Canada in the aftermath of the suppressed Rebellions of 1837-1838. What follows is a preliminary statement on the paradoxical character of class formation in these two 19th-century social formations. One paradox of development was that of material well-being. Outposts of empire, the one a dumping ground for convicts, the other a classic mercantilist harvester of the resources of forest and sea, Australia and Canada had become, by the mid-to-late 19th century, the richest of colonies. (1) Fogel and Engerman, in an admittedly partisan effort to establish that the American south was not particularly backward on the eve of the Civil War, rank Australia first in their global assessment of per capita income from twenty nations and regions. Its constructed level of 144 outpaced other leading political economies, among them the United States North (140), Great Britain (126), the southern states and Switzerland (both at 100), and Canada, which had a respectable figure of 96. European nation states trailed both Australia and Canada, while a colony such as India, so favoured in the ideological and military accounting of imperial expansion, scored a dismal per capita income measure of nine, its robust indigenous population numbering in the hundreds of millions and driving British investment per capita down to 1.2 pounds. The equivalent Australian figure was 73 pounds. (2)