The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation

Shane Chalmers, “The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation”, Law & Literature (2022)

24 Pages Posted: 28 Mar 2022

See all articles by Shane Chalmers

Shane Chalmers

The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law; The University of Adelaide - Law School

Date Written: January 10, 2022

Abstract

Edward Gibbon Wakefield is usually remembered as the English political economist whose theorisation of “systematic colonisation” provided the blueprint for the establishment of British colonies in Australia and New Zealand. This paper re-reads Wakefield’s writings on systematic colonisation as works of utopian literature, which not only represented a social fantasy that was deeply capitalist, but worked to realise the settler-colonial projects through the literary projection of this fantasy. Through the re-reading, the paper focuses on two main points. One, the force of Wakefield’s work was the force of literature. It was not Wakefield’s scholarly contributions to political-economic thought that made his work such a force of history; it was the literary form of his writings on colonisation that enabled his work to capture and incite the social imagination, as works of fiction in a utopian tradition going back to Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. And two, the force of Wakefield’s literary work was the force of law. Not only did Wakefield’s utopian literature crystallise a social fantasy in a way that made it available, and seductively so, to legislators, but Wakefield’s literature gave meaning and effect to the resulting legislation of the colonies.

Keywords: law and literature, utopia, settler colonialism, systematic colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield

Suggested Citation

Chalmers, Shane, The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation (January 10, 2022). Shane Chalmers, “The Utopian Law and Literature of Systematic Colonisation”, Law & Literature (2022), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4042314

Shane Chalmers (Contact Author)

The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law ( email )

Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
China

The University of Adelaide - Law School ( email )

Ligertwood Building
Adelaide, SA 5005
Australia

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