A joint event with the Global History and Culture Centre.

Presentation, refreshments, discussion. All are welcome.

This paper arises from a nearly-completed book on the age of revolutions, empire and counter-revolt in the small seas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It has the Tasman Sea and Bass Strait and their waves as its subject. It casts this space as a maritime frontier from which the colonisation of neighbouring territories took shape. In this maritime frontier, concerns to do with slavery, piracy or irregular settlement, could authorise the rise of a bureaucratic state and set the context for pastoralism on land. Yet in making such a claim, the argument determinedly approaches the counter-revolutionary project of British colonisation from the perspective of colonised people and changing conceptions of race and gender. It peoples this critical age of transition and combines its intimate markers with broader political and ideological change.