Miniature Britains

Edward Gibbon Wakefield imagined that Britain could be reproduced overseas-not merely extended, but remade in miniature.

His theories of "systematic colonisation" helped shape two of the nineteenth century's most ambitious settler projects: South Australia and New Zealand. Behind them lay a striking utopian promise. Carefully controlled land sales, planned migration and the transplantation of British institutions would supposedly create orderly, prosperous societies without the poverty, overcrowding and social disorder of industrial Britain.

But these visions of improvement depended upon the seizure and transformation of Indigenous lands.

Miniature Britains traces the development of Wakefield's ideas, the political networks that carried them into practice, and the very different colonial societies that emerged in South Australia and New Zealand. It explores how reformers, investors, politicians and colonists attempted to turn an abstract theory of settlement into functioning societies-and how their plans collided with Indigenous sovereignty, local conditions and the realities of empire.

At once a history of ideas, empire and colonial experimentation, Miniature Britains examines the seductive logic behind nineteenth-century schemes to build "better" Britains overseas, and the human consequences concealed within the language of progress, civilisation and improvement.