7 May 2026. Private Empire: Company Colonisation and the Settler Revolution with Matthew Birchall
7 May 2026, 2pm
In-person at Melbourne Law School
Register Here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScSd3XFpnlVEectBky00czyUIz_Wek-k5IsZWacL6TvE2vBYA/viewform?usp=header
Private Empire: Company Colonisation and the Settler Revolution
Matthew Birchall
In the 1830s and 1840s, a suite of British companies made bold claims to build a new antipodean empire. The penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land were a world away from what a fresh generation of reformers had in mind. Private enterprise, not the state, would reign supreme – or so its advocates claimed. In this revival of company colonisation, merchants and intellectuals joined forces in London to create free colonies in South Australia, New Zealand and Western Australia. They were hugely influential, if always controversial. They recruited tens of thousands of migrants, acquired vast tracts of Indigenous land, and drew the British state into repeated crises – from the annexation of New Zealand in 1840 to financial bailouts and parliamentary inquiries into race war.
In this talk, I trace the rise and fall of company colonisation in Australia and New Zealand, examining the ideas that inspired it, the networks that sustained it, and the crises that brought it undone. I show how a small, interconnected band of company men treated the antipodes as a portfolio of speculative opportunities, and how they tried – and failed – to remake Britain’s settler empire in their corporate self-image. The corporation, I argue, was not a footnote to the settler revolution but one of its principal engines.
Biography
Matthew Birchall is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population at the University of New South Wales. He works on the economic and intellectual history of colonisation in Australia and New Zealand, with a particular focus on chartered companies. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2022.
