The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Struggle for Order

Abstract

Concerns about crime and disorder, and how to manage those challenges, predominate in contemporary official and published accounts of all the Pacific gold rushes, as well as in many regional and national historical studies produced since. During the last two decades, several comparative and global analyses have begun to map some of connections and distinctions between the struggle for order in the Californian and British colonial contexts. This chapter focuses in on some of the specific historical threads that connected the struggle for order in California and Britain’s settler colonies during the 1850s and 1860s. In doing so, it sets out to shed fresh light on the extent to which Californians’ and Britons’ anxieties about the potential impact of gold rushes and their ideas about how they should be managed were often closely interlinked. This chapter is by Benjamin Mountford.