New South Wales developed from a colony governed largely by its governor into a society with an elected legislative council, ex-convict voters and officeholders, and adult white male suffrage. Its institutional transformation was neither automatic nor free of conflict: former convicts, free settlers, and colonial elites contested labor policy and political representation, while the colony’s particular circumstances made it difficult for a small ruling group to establish extractive control. In the book’s comparison, New South Wales and Virginia moved toward more inclusive institutions by a path different from England’s, where a long-entrenched monarchy had to be challenged by revolution.

A colony with limits on extraction

The early circumstances of New South Wales resembled those of Jamestown, Virginia, founded 181 years earlier. The settlers in New South Wales included convicts, while most Jamestown settlers had been indentured laborers; but in neither place did colonial authorities encounter the conditions that could readily support a highly extractive system. Neither colony had a dense indigenous population available for exploitation, precious metals such as gold or silver, or the soil and crops that would make slave plantations profitable. Although the slave trade was still active in the 1780s, filling New South Wales with enslaved people was not economically viable.

Those constraints shaped the colony’s political possibilities. The soldiers and free settlers who ran New South Wales, like the Virginia Company in Virginia, faced pressures that gradually pushed them toward more inclusive economic institutions, developing alongside more inclusive political ones. The book argues that this occurred with less struggle in New South Wales than in Virginia, and that later attempts to reverse the trend failed. That comparison does not imply that inclusion arrived without conflict; it identifies how the circumstances of settlement limited the ability of would-be colonial rulers to secure an enduring monopoly over society.

From gubernatorial rule to representation

Until 1823, the governor ruled New South Wales more or less on his own. That year, the British government limited his powers by creating an appointed council. Its initial membership reflected the existing colonial hierarchy: appointees came from the Squatters and the nonconvict elite, including John Macarthur. But this arrangement could not contain growing demands for political participation.

In 1831, Governor Richard Bourke bowed to pressure and for the first time allowed ex-convicts to sit on juries. Former convicts and many newly arrived free settlers also wanted convict transportation from Britain to stop. Transportation increased competition in the labor market and pushed wages down, a result favored by the Squatters but opposed by those whose labor was being undercut. Their demand prevailed: transportation to New South Wales ended in 1840.

A further institutional change followed in 1842, when a legislative council was created with two-thirds of its members elected and the rest appointed. Ex-convicts could vote and stand for office if they held sufficient property, and many did. Representation therefore widened through a gradual series of changes, even as property qualifications continued to determine who could take part.

Suffrage and the limits of elite resistance

By the 1850s, New South Wales had adult white male suffrage. The political demands of citizens, former convicts, and their families had gone further than William Wentworth had initially imagined. Wentworth had by then joined conservatives who insisted on maintaining an unelected Legislative Council, but, as with Macarthur before him, he could not stop the movement toward more inclusive institutions.

The change was not confined to New South Wales. Victoria, carved out of New South Wales in 1851, and Tasmania introduced an effective secret ballot in 1856, becoming the first places in the world to do so. By protecting the secrecy of a vote, the ballot hindered vote-buying and coercion; the standard method of secret voting is still known as the Australian ballot. In the book’s account, this concrete electoral safeguard marks how far political change had moved beyond the colonial elite’s original assumptions.

A different route to institutional change

The comparison with England clarifies New South Wales’s distinct trajectory. England had a long history of deeply entrenched absolutist rule, and removing it required revolution, including the conflicts of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. The United States and Australia did not inherit the same established absolutist order, so those English revolutions were not necessary to their development of inclusive institutions. This difference did not make their histories conflict-free: the United States had to throw off British colonial rule, and political struggles in New South Wales were persistent.

Lord Baltimore in Maryland and John Macarthur in New South Wales might have aspired to the sort of powerful position associated with a monarch, but they could not establish a sufficiently strong hold on society to make those ambitions durable. New South Wales’s path to political inclusion rested on the interaction of its founding conditions and organized demands for change: the colony’s rulers had limited means to build an extractive order, while former convicts and free settlers pressed to reshape political representation and labor policy. The resulting development was gradual, contested, and difficult to reverse.