Imperial white space

Abstract

This dissertation argues that white Britons imagined the British Empire as a white space in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking the Imperial federation movement as an example of the phenomenon at the Imperial scale and taking Queensland as an example at the level of an individual colony. It shows that the proponents of Imperial federation-a movement to reform the constitution of the British Empire by such means as creating an Imperial legislature in which colonies would be represented-imagined the Empire as a white space, largely ignoring the existence of the majority of British subjects who were racialized as nonwhite. It similarly shows that white settlers in Queensland imagined it as a white space, both in its early colonial development and after it became a state in the Commonwealth of Australia. There was more than one way in which a state could be imagined as white, however, as illustrated by the tension between imagining Queensland as a plantation colony reliant on indentured laborers of color-a space of white racial domination-and imagining Queensland as a space of white racial exclusion, as it became under the federal White Australia policy after 1901. The dissertation also explores the boundaries of whiteness, highlighting the incoherence of the category and the contingency of who it included and excluded. Sources for the dissertation are both archival and published. The primary archival sources are public records at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Queensland State Archives, and the National Archives of Australia. The main published sources are Australian newspapers (in particular, the National Library of Australia's digitized Trove collection) and the books, pam- phlets, and journal articles published by participants in the debates around Imperial federation.--Author's abstract