REVIEW ESSAY SETTLER CAPITALISM REVISITED Peter Beilharz and Lloyd Cox Over the last quarter of a century, Australian historiography and politi- cal analysis has witnessed a significant shift in the dominant terms of refer- ence for thinking about the past, and about its relationship to the present and future. By the early 1980s an influential body of thought had coalesced around the proposition that Australia’s political economy could be best understood through the lens of ‘settler’ or ‘dominion’ capitalism. These terms denote the distinctive forms that capitalism took in the white settler colonies of the British Empire and the temperate zones of South America (Ehrensaft and Armstrong, 1978; Denoon, 1983; Head, 1983; McMichael, 1984; Gerardi, 1985). The key argument was that Australia carried a pattern of family resem- blances with these other settler colonies, which arose from their shared historical experience as both colonizers and colonized (Macintyre, 1989: 11). These resemblances included an early and significant degree of political autonomy from the imperial power out of which they were established; the early commodification of land and hence labour, with a corresponding absence of a large peasantry; relative economic prosperity for white settlers, including workers, despite or perhaps because of a highly dependent form of economic development that was disproportionately centred on primary production for the imperial market; mass immigration of white settlers from the metropolitan power and the attendant physical and cultural destruction, or at least the brutal subjugation, of indigenous populations. This final characteristic was the original presupposition and condition for all the other features noted. These contributed to distinctive patterns of inter- and intra- class relations and political institutions, which continued to shape realities in the settler colonies long after the conditions that gave rise to them had Thesis Eleven, Number 88, February 2007: 112–124 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513607072461