School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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James Stirling, first governor of Western Australia and imperial investor

Arnott, G (Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery Project in collaboration with National Centre for Biography, 2021-03-18)

Admiral James Stirling arrived on Noongar land in 1829 to proclaim it the British colony of Western Australia. Officially, he represented the British government. Unofficially, he represented the commercial interests of his family, a collection of British naval officers, East India Company administrators and directors, imperial merchants, shipping magnates, their wives and their descendants. Stirling pursued the colony as an investment opportunity, first with the Colonial Office and then through land selections, the manipulation of market conditions and private capital-raising schemes. This pursuit was shaped by three, interrelated social phenomena. Firstly, numerous strands of his family had become wealthy through transatlantic and Caribbean slavery. Secondly, British government incentives for establishing a colony on the western side of Australia strengthened at the same time as it was shifting away from the ‘slave colonies’ and certain forms of unfree labour. And third, this shift placed pressure on the Stirling family to secure new income streams to maintain affluence and power. This seminar will explore these dynamics and ask: in what ways does the intergenerational biographical method expand and enliven, or alternatively risk reducing, our understanding of the legacies of British slavery in the Australian settler colonies?
National Biographies and Transnational Lives: legacies of British slavery across the empire

Laidlaw, Z ; Arnott, G (Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery Project in collaboration with National Centre for Biography, 2021-04-01)

Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and slavery affected the lives and fortunes of many nineteenth-century immigrants to the Australian colonies. Some transferred capital directly from plantation economies to newly burgeoning settler colonial societies; for others, the connections were more diffuse. As historians have shown, the Australian colonies provided individual immigrants with an opportunity to refashion their existing reputations or even create them afresh. At the same time, collective colonial and settler identities were asserted in cultural, social, economic and political fora. This seminar explores dictionaries of biography as sites for the mutual constitution of individual and national (or colonial) identities. Alongside a consideration of how slavery and the slavery business feature in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Biographical Dictionary of Western Australians, it explores how Britain and its other settler colonies remembered, forgot, or suppressed, the legacies of British slavery in their national biographical dictionaries.
Examining the Interest: British pro-slavery thought [Review of the book The Interest: How the British establishment resisted the abolition of slavery by Michael Taylor]

Arnott, G (Australian Book Review, 2021-03-01)

In August 1823, Quamina Gladstone and his son Jack led an uprising in the British sugar colony of Demerara where they were held as slaves. The men believed that the British parliament had voted to abolish slavery and that this was being concealed from them. The colonists quashed the rebellion with firepower, torture, and execution. Something had happened in Britain’s parliament: the Anti-Slavery Society’s Thomas Buxton had given a speech, proposing gradual reform. Yet it would take another decade, and much political upheaval, for the British parliament to abolish slavery. Michael Taylor’s book is set during these ten long years.
Links in the chain: legacies of British slavery in Australia

Arnott, G (Australian Book Review, 2020-08-01)

In 2007, Britain’s Royal Mint issued a £2 coin commemorating two hundred years since the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the zero in ‘1807’ appearing as if a broken link in a chain. While interrupting the notorious transatlantic trade, the Act did not end slavery itself – that was achieved, at least in parts of the British world, with further legislation in 1833 that outlawed enslavement in the British Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Cape of Good Hope. Emphasis on the dramatic, if illusionary, chain-breaking moment in some bicentenary celebrations extended a tradition of dwelling on Britain’s role in slave emancipation. The years 1807 and 1833 functioned partly within British society to obscure the fact that Britain had been a willing and central player in the cruel transatlantic business for almost four hundred years. What’s more, commemorations often overlooked unfree labour practices that continued to proliferate throughout the British world. Britain brought freedom, the coin seemed to say.
Australia’s deep connection with enslavement

Arnott, G ( 2020-06-16)

What is sometimes forgotten in discussions of slavery in the British Empire is that the British Parliament paid out £20 million in restitution after it finally abolished slavery in 1833. That is around £300 billion ($546 billion) in today’s money, and it represented about 40 per cent of treasury’s annual income. Before the GFC bank bailouts, it was Britain's largest transfer of public wealth into private hands. It shows what can be done. People harmed in the name of private enterprise can be compensated on a large scale, and economies are not crippled. In fact, like the GFC bailouts, the £20 million had a stimulatory effect, turbo-charging a range of capital works in the private sector, such as railways.
Commemorating James Stirling?

Arnott, G (ABC Radio Natonal | www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-history-listen/commemorating-james-stirling/13642650, 2021-12-07)

The statue of Western Australia's first governor, Captain James Stirling, in central Perth, is hard to miss; there's also a mountain range, a suburban municipality and even a school named after him. As the state looks towards its bicentenary, new questions are being asked about James Stirling, including his involvement in frontier violence and in the British slave trade.
James Stirling (1791-1865), enslavement and Western Australia

Arnott, G (Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery | https://lbsatucl.wordpress.com/, 2022)

Since 2020, the Western Australian Legacies of British Slavery project, in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, has been examining the role of British slavery in the 1829 colonisation of Australia’s western third. The project was stimulated by the LBS database and the work of historians showing the importance of slavery networks, capital, commerce, and ideas to imperial endeavour across the Indian and Pacific oceans in the early nineteenth century. One of the expectations of the project was that researchers would identify further individuals linking British slavery to Western Australia. How many slave-owners relocated from the Caribbean to Australia’s first privately funded colony in the emancipation period? To date, a search for ‘Western Australia’ under ‘Notes’ in the LBS database produces fifteen individuals.
Lachlan Macquarie was a slave owner and he wasn't the only one: It's time to update the history books

Arnott, G (ABC News, 2021-12-15)

Many Australians accept that history is contested and constantly evolving.  A quick glance at a 1950s Australian history book shows how far we have come. Those books tended to say more about Britain's royal family than Australia's First Nations. Today, the reverse is true in Australian schools. In September 2021, then Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge declared curriculums were "downplaying modern Australia, downplaying Western civilisation, downplaying our liberal democracy, which has created so much wealth and opportunity". Proposed changes to the national curriculum reflect an "overly negative view of Australia".

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