Sensible distances

During the eighteenth century, the South Pacific became available to European expansion, and specifically to British exploration, trade and penal settlement. Recent scholarship has shown that this expansion occurred without agreement as to its function and benefits. As Jonathan Lamb has argued, the establishment of Britain’s Pacific dominions was characterised less by deliberate policy than by confusion in the face of the unknown. For all its immediacy and emotion, however, the early Pacific colonialism of sensibility, as we might call it, barely lasted into the nineteenth century. In the wake of the establishment of the Botany Bay penal colony, and in the aftermath of 1789, the Pacific was increasingly figured as a place of settlement. Wakefield’s theory was essentially a colonial adaptation of Ricardo’s analysis of the relations between land, labour and capital. Wakefield radically refigures the global sympathy appealed to by eighteenth-century benevolent sentimentalists like the elder Forster as something like the industrial production of human beings.