In her wonderful book, Anti-Slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?, Jane Lydon explores the connections between antislavery and Australia, more specifically the multilayered links, relationships, continuities, and transformations between the abolition of the slave trade, slavery, amelioration, abolition, and apprenticeship; and penal transportation, convict labor, migration, Indigenous devastation, and labor exploitation. Lydon takes a transnational approach to cover a rich and wide geographical terrain, enveloping the Australian colonies in an analysis that stretches from Britain, South America, and the Caribbean to Africa, India, and the Indian and Pacific oceans. The book opens in the 1780s, covers the key decades of the 1820s to 1840s, and extends through the rest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries right up to the present day. Lydon's central provocation is bold and unequivocal: as sites for the alternative investment for capital, goods, and people, settler colonialism was the economic solution to the abolition of slavery. Furthermore, not only did abolition impel Indigenous dispossession and violence in the settler colonial context, with all their aftermaths and legacies in the modern world, but the dichotomies of “slavery” and “freedom” that emerged in the 1800s are now “inscribed . . . indelibly in the Western imaginary” (173).

I would argue that, for the past three decades, in their attention to tracing the mobility, experiences, and lives of transportation convicts, historians of Australia have been world-leading pioneers of connected and global history. For example, they have undertaken research on the extraordinary lives and experiences of convicts of non-Anglo-Celtic heritage who were shipped from Britain and the colonies to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land, and Norfolk Island. Among them were men, women, and children who shed their legal status as slaves upon conviction (their owners were compensated in the same way as those whose chattel were sentenced to death). Most recently, Australianists (including Lydon) have also explored related issues, including the rhetorical power of enslavement for the anti-transportation lobby (and the value of the existence of convict degradation to pro-slavers), and how categories and practices used in the slave colonies of the Caribbean were transplanted to the convict colonies. Against this background, Lydon takes connected and global history to a whole new level. She effects a sharp analysis of some of the big themes of history—industrial capitalism, labor, migration, power, class, and race—through close attention to the mechanics of imperial governance. Along with her special focus on parliamentary debate, Lydon draws on a remarkable range of other sources, from admiralty court records, commemorative medallions, and empire-wide print culture to writings on political economy and Colonial Office correspondence. There is so much to admire. One focus is how humanitarian principles and techniques from the anti-slavery movement were applied to Indigenous peoples of empire—who at the same time “bore the cost of abolition” (15). Another is just how central theories of labor discipline were for both amelioration in the slave colonies and the foundation of new (non-slave) colonial labor systems elsewhere.

Lydon's underpinning argument is that colonization in Australasia and emancipation in the Caribbean were mutually exclusive and reinforcing. She expands current understandings of the relationship between slavery and industrial capitalism to incorporate emigration and settler colonialism, breaking new ground in revealing how the lines of liberalism were drawn to exclude specific populations from civil society (171). This included non-white peoples and convicts, whose “path to liberation” (13) was discipline and labor. Lydon's book conceptualizes enslavement, migration, transportation, and indenture relationally, and where the Australian colonies provided alternative sites of investment for capital and goods, she demonstrates that this was often overseen by people who had worked previously in the Caribbean. Her exposure of the hypocrisies of governmentality in Britain and its colonies (at the same time as elites approached the management of slaves, the working classes, and convicts in remarkably similar ways) is neatly done, turning on the idea of an “imperial emotional economy” (44). Lydon meticulously traces the paths through which people, ideas, categories, and practices flowed; confronts us with some of the contradictions of accepted ideas around the relationship between slavery and industrial capitalism; and gives a compelling interpretation that, overall, revisits questions of race, freedom, and citizenship.

Famously, upon occupation, the first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, declared that there would be no slavery in the free land of New South Wales. While it was the case that the Australian colonies were not integrated into slave trading in the years of British occupation prior to abolition (that is, 1788–1807) (though a few ships and captains served both the slave and convict trade), as Lydon demonstrates, slavery was far from irrelevant. The reproduction of the principles of emancipation spread around empire, undergirded by a commitment to free trade, while at the same time labor was racialized. Furthermore, the continuities, transplantations, and transformations of slavery remain highly relevant in Australia today. The human rights abuses associated with forced labor (including through people trafficking and modern slavery) are intertwined with Indigenous inequalities. While the penal contracts associated with indentured labor (including of Melanesian migrants in the nineteenth century) might have fallen from favor, workers in Australia, as elsewhere, remain highly regulated and casualized. Without a proper understanding of the ways in which ideas of freedom are historically constituted, there can be no evidence-based platform from which to address human rights abuses and precarity. Lydon's book represents a very fine move in that important direction.