Unsettled Subjects
Race, Mobility and Colonial Citizenship in the Australian Settler Colonies
Published on 20. November 2025
Book
Hardback
232 pages
978-1-009-48943-0 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'Unsettled Subjects shows brilliantly just how differently Australian history is being written today. In place of the imperial and national histories of old, we have here a deft exploration of citizenship, belonging, and racial exclusion set in a very wide framework indeed. Students of Australian colonial history and specialist historians of race, colonialism, and empire alike will enjoy this book.' Ann Curthoys, Australian National University 'With skill and nuance, Amanda Nettelbeck unpicks 'citizenship' in Britain's post-emancipation empire. To secure and discipline a labour force, settler colonisers extended rhetorically expansive, but practically limited, rights to non-white immigrants. Yet those immigrants in turn demanded rights and justice by performing everyday, domestic and de facto citizenship.' Zoe Laidlaw, University of Melbourne 'In this impressively wide-ranging analysis, Nettelbeck shows how British settler societies were as critical to racial capitalism as colonial plantation societies. She demonstrates how settler authorities tried to balance British emigrants' racially exclusive sense of belonging with their demand for Indian and Chinese emigrants' labour, and how the categories of subjecthood and citizenship were continually revised in the process.' Alan Lester, University of Sussex 'Mobile Indian, Afghan and Chinese labourers are usually presented as bit players in Australia's colonial history. In this fine study, they are centre-stage - revealing the evolving relationship between British subjecthood and both imagined and de facto colonial citizenship. Australian citizenship has a fascinating history.' Angela Woollacott, Australian National UniversityMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises; 20 Halftones, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
493 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-009-48943-0 (9781009489430)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
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.
Content
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.