Meeting the cost of Australian imperialism
Doctoral thesis
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3130284Utgivelsesdato
2024Metadata
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Sammendrag
Why and how do some societies exploit other societies? These are key questions among historians. Yet, they have received varying degrees of attention in different parts of the world. This thesis addresses such a gap in a corner of the world that has received scant attention by scholars. It explores how and why Australia exploited the people and the minerals of its closest neighbours Papua and New Guinea between 1884 and 1939.
Drawing upon a wide range of archival material from Australia, Great Britain, and Papua New Guinea, this thesis demonstrates the embedded interconnectedness of the mining sectors and histories of Papua, New Guinea, and Australia in this period. It focuses on four main mineral laws through which Australia’s broader colonial strategies in the territories are explored. I argue that Australia exploited the territories to ensure its own security and economic interests. Colonial laws were designed to prioritise the interests of European settlers. This often happened at the expense of the Indigenous populations, whose own mineral rights were neglected. The ensuing system paid for the colonisation effort itself by maintaining Australia’s administrations in Papua and New Guinea. In other words, imperialism became a solution to ensuring the territorial integrity of the Australian continent, and the exploitation that ensued became a way of maintaining this structure of defense indefinitely.