Abstract
Australian historiography traditionally has privileged the study of the organized working class. This established history ignores socially disruptive elements in late-nineteenth-century Sydney (the height of working-class organization), such as “larrikins,” who have been too simply categorized as an expression of antiauthoritarianism born out of convictism. This paper argues, rather, that larrikins can be understood as a form of resistance to a nascent industrial capitalism and its increasing psychological impositions. This new form of capitalism sought to create, through the rhetoric and practices of respectability and discipline, a new type of worker and a new type of human being. This paper explores these themes in relation to the city of Sydney in the 1880s, concentrating on the reaction of the state to the challenges posed by subaltern groups such as larrikins to the emerging hegemonic principles of industrial capitalism.
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