Chapter 1 provides a contextual outline of how colonial mobility and territorial expansion restructured the British Empire after the abolition of slavery. As colonial investment stepped up in pace around the empire from the 1830s, the principles of liberal imperial reform were most strongly expressed in terms of protecting freedom of labour mobility and implementing an integrative vision of an empire peopled with rights-bearing subjects. At the same time, new patterns of labour coercion and settler colonial violence put pressure on imperial and colonial governments to more closely regulate the relationship between British subjects and others. The growing presence of non-European immigrants in the settler colonies, constituting a mixture of British subjects and legal aliens, drew forth mixed views. Whether envisaged as disruptive forces or as assimilable into new economies and formations of settler colonial society, non-European peoples and their capacity for global mobility helped shape debates about the settler colonies’ place within a global empire.

At the end of the nineteenth century, settler states gained implicit imperial sanction to practice racialised border-policing on disingenuous grounds of language proficiency. As is well known, this outcome was the result of settler dominion efforts through the late nineteenth century to consolidate ‘whiteness’ as the structuring principle of future settler nationhood. But the pathway to this outcome was neither smooth nor inexorable: it emerged from an interconnected colonial world that was inherently multiracial and unsettled. Although the nineteenth-century experiment of settler colonisation was dominated by British migrants motivated by land ownership, the settler colonies were also occupied by a diverse mix of non-European people on the move. Their contributions formed an essential underpinning of settler colonial growth in ways that highlighted Australia’s dependency on broader patterns of colonial trade and migration around and beyond the empire. Of the ethnically diverse peoples who migrated to colonial Australia, some were already British subjects; others were not. But a great many became permanent settlers who asserted their own understandings of citizenship in empire.

Adding a race and colonialism component, this chapter examines how citizenship has been used as a powerful tool to undermine the colonized and erect an essentially race-based firewall between white Europeans, who are citizens, and colonials who are given lesser status. Investment migration is inseparable from citizenship’s past as a colonial tool of racial domination and subjugation.