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This chapter talks about negative shocks from internal imbalance, external factors, and drought wrought havoc with the economy for more than a decade. Against this background of a major threat to prosperity, important changes occurred in the institutional framework with the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901. Though some recovery in economic fortunes occurred before the outbreak of war, it was short-lived. Per capita real GDP fell by 22 percent by 1895 and did not regain its 1889 peak for a full two decades. The approach adopted here includes a comparative perspective on Australians' reduced levels of prosperity between 1890 and 1914. Australia recorded the highest per capita income in the world for some period prior to the 1890s. The chapter shows how this achievement has never been repeated.

This chapter examines the nature of investment, trade, and economic nationalism in colonial Australia. It argues that British finance played only a minor role in the first half-century of colonization because during this period Australian colonies remained undercapitalized. However, free trading brought great advantages to Australian exporters to Britain and entrepreneurs benefitted from membership to the Empire by being able to offer loans on the London markets at favourable secured rates.

This chapter looks at how the gold rushes beginning in the 1850s brought not only a diversification of the economic basis of prosperity beyond that provided by the wool industry, but coincided with the de facto political independence of five of the Australian colonies through their attainment of responsible government from Britain. Critical to the maintenance and extension of prosperity during these turbulent years was the way in which the shock to the economy of the gold discoveries was mediated by the evolving economic and political institutions. Gold continued to be important to prosperity for several decades, while a resumption of the expansion of the wool industry was matched by the development of other branches of agriculture.

This chapter examines the relevance of exhibitions to British imperialism. It explains that exhibitions provided for a simultaneous and shared envisioning and for physical participation, in addition to the collective psychological and cultural processes of imagining the nation and empire. The chapter suggests that enthusiasm for exhibitions was also articulated across the Indian Ocean from the Australian colonies, and that exhibitions also offered intellectual, economic, and cultural sinews to tie together the vast leviathan of British India.

This chapter examines Irish racial discourse in the Australian colonies during the five years that the Young Irelanders spent there as “state prisoners.” Juxtaposing the private and public writings of these exiles with the opinions of Irish Australia’s main weekly newspaper, the chapter reveals the early inklings of global nationalism. On the one hand, finding themselves in a society united not by nationalism but by settler colonialism, Irish Celts portrayed themselves as hearty pioneers entirely suitable for membership in this far-flung British settler society. On the other hand, global nationalism’s edge of ethnic solidarity, which situated these migrants spatially among contemporary Irish Celts abroad, remained strong. As it had in Ireland in the 1840s, the international spread of the Irish popular press fostered the construction of this new identity.

This chapter examines the advent of native title in Australia. In the Australian settler colony, native title figures in the liberal imagination as a moment where some sort of hybridization of sovereignty could be achieved. However, once historicized in this context, it signifies not a pluralistic sharing of lawmaking power but an incorporation of Indigenous sovereignties, which limits their possibilities by transforming them into a supplement to the decentered settler sovereignty that is destabilized by the acknowledgment of precolonial—and continuing—Indigenous communities. As such a supplement, it therefore suppresses the danger of the end of terra nullius, reaffirming the force of settler law through reburying Indigenous sovereignties at its foundation.