Slavery in the settler colony: Zoë Laidlaw, Jane Lydon (eds), Legacies of British slavery in Australia and New Zealand, Manchester University Press, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Slavery in the settler colony: Zoë Laidlaw, Jane Lydon (eds), Legacies of British slavery in Australia and New Zealand, Manchester University Press, 2026

07Apr26

Description: This book investigates the legacies of British slavery beyond Britain, focusing on the colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and explores why this history has been overlooked. After August 1833, when the British Parliament abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape, former slave owners were paid compensation for the loss of their ‘property’. New research shows that many beneficiaries had ties to other parts of the British Empire, including the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Through a range of case studies, contributors to this collection trace the movement of people, goods, capital and practices from the Caribbean to the new Australasian settler colonies. Chapters consider a range of places, people and themes to reveal the varied ways that slavery continued to shape imperial relationships, economic networks and racial labour regimes after 1833: from the life stories of those travelling from the Caribbean to the new settler colonies, to the extensive links between Caribbean slavery and the mid-nineteenth-century development of colonial industries such as pastoralism, and Queensland’s sugar industry. For the first time, this collection tracks reinvestment in the new colonies and experiments with ‘free’ labour championed by colonisers with strong financial or personal links to Caribbean slavery. It shows that colonisers’ connections to Caribbean slavery shaped their approach to First Nations peoples in seeking to exploit their land, control their labour and meet anti-colonial resistance with lethal violence.

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