Republicanism and Responsible Government: The Shaping of Democracy in Australia and Canada by Benjamin T. Jones (review)

Australian and Canadian history shared significant similarities both in politics and on their frontiers in the nineteenth century, along with important differences. While the expanding field of settler colonial history now often brings these histories into the same frame of analysis, studies that directly connect or compare them at length are not common. For this reason, Benjamin Jones’s study of the development of responsible government in the two places in the middle of the nineteenth century is to be welcomed. Republicanism and Responsible Government contributes to world history in the sense of connecting two disparate sites through this shared political evolution, though it does not seek to place these stories of political maturation in a broader global framework. Its methodology involves drawing connections more than making full-blown comparisons.

Jones is as much—if not more—interested in political philosophy as in history. His focus is squarely on civic republicanism, which he defines as “a society of citizens engaging in activities to promote the body politic” and “to counter the desire for self-gain (corruption) with the desire for the greater good (virtue)” (pp. 18–19). This is a political philosophy now enjoying currency in both Spain and Switzerland, not least through the work of philosopher Philip Pettit. Jones presents a history of the ideas he sees in civic republicanism, and explains that the aim of his book is to show how the reform leaders in Canada and Australia from the 1830s through the 1850s drew on this intellectual tradition at least as much as they did from Lockean liberalism. He also puts forward the concept of Christian civic republicanism, arguing that nonconformist religion was significant in shaping a shared vision of “a British Christian society dedicated to civic virtue, civic duty, and a civic religion” (p. 16). Further, Jones is at pains to argue that separatist (that is, anti-monarchical) republicanism was a minor strain in the politics of the day, and of much less import than civic republicanism.

Beside the two introductory and one concluding chapters framing the book, there are four chapters on Canada and three on Australia. The Canadian chapters cover the rebellions of 1837–1838 in Upper and Lower Canada; Lord Durham’s 1838 Report on the Affairs of British North America and its significance; the role of newspaper editor Joseph Howe in pressing for responsible government in Nova Scotia; and those of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine in Upper and Lower Canada, respectively. The Australian chapters deal with the political career and significance of the Presbyterian cleric John Dunmore Lang and his role in the movement for representative and responsible government in New South Wales; the Anti-Transportation League and its campaign to stop the shipping of convicts to Australia; and the story of the Eureka Stockade on the Ballarat goldfields in 1854 and the consequent 1855 trials.

I am insufficiently expert in Canadian history to assess how original those chapters are, though I found them interesting. In relation to the chapters on Australia, that on John Dunmore Lang is welcome because while his name is familiar, he has not been the subject of much historical attention in recent decades. The Anti-Transportation League has received more attention, as in the recently completed doctoral dissertation by Chris Holdridge, comparing the opposition to convict transportation in both South Africa and Australia and showing the connections among those movements, the push for colonial constitutional reform, and the emerging settler polities.²⁰

My main reservation about Jones’s book concerns his presentation of the Eureka Stockade. He is familiar with the debate in Australian historiography surrounding Eureka, even citing some of the prominent historians who have objected to its mythological elevation in Australian history and pointing out the consequent distortions. Nevertheless, Jones contends that civic republicanism “drove the miners to take their fateful stand and resulted soon after in the...