Human rights in Australia’s early international relations: unity, prosperity, and the abolition of slavery

Abstract

ABSTRACT For the most part, histories of Australia’s international relations locate the origins of its engagement with the international human rights regime in the 1940s. By then, however, debates about human rights had been appearing in the Australian newspapers for more than a century, focused, among other things, on the application of universal rights to the foreign peoples with which the colonies were engaged in their international affairs. Drawing on archival materials and newspaper articles from 1803 to 1901, this article examines the place of human rights in the international relations of nineteenth century colonial Australia. Focusing on debates over the use of Indian and South Sea Islander indentured labour, it demonstrates how ideas developed in the context of the anti-slavery movement of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries shaped debates about the universal applicability of human rights in the Australian colonies’ engagements with others. In doing so, it provides an account of the early development of human rights ideas in the Australian colonies and demonstrates how they sought to resist human rights claims in their international affairs, choosing instead to prioritise the pursuit of national (racial) unity and prosperity over the rights of others.