AustLit

'‘Follow the money’ is a precept as useful to the historian as the detective, especially when the history in question has anything to do with empire. Decades before Lenin identified imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’, the English economist Herman Merivale (1806-1874) recognised that colonial possessions functioned above all as fields for economic activity, spaces in which capital and labour could be employed to generate riches both for the encroaching settlers and for the homeland from which they came. However multifarious its legacies, colonisation is at its heart a system for transferring wealth, or the means of getting it, from the original residents and traditional custodians of a territory to its invaders and self-declared new ‘owners’. This is the essential nature and purpose of colonialism. Anything else that may follow – freedom, servitude, religious conversion, political transformation, genocide – is a consequence or rationalisation or side-effect of that core intention.' (Introdution)