Capital, Agents and Absentees: Port Phillip Pastoralism and the Profits of Slavery

Abstract

This article reveals that British-based merchants invested capital made from the Atlantic slave complex in the early Port Phillip District’s pastoral sector. It traces the capital that underpinned two of early Victoria’s most significant pastoral companies–Niel Black and Co. and the Clyde Company. Partners in these companies, wealthy Glasgow- and Liverpool-based merchants, received compensation from the British government for their emancipated workers in the Caribbean, continued to own enslaved people and plantations in the United States, and traded in commodities created with enslaved labour. As well as investing large sums of capital in Victorian pastoralism, they also transferred business techniques, relationships and ideas from the Atlantic to Australia. Examining these connections reveals the economic logic of British colonialism: this violent Australian manifestation of ‘racial capitalism’ linked enslaved labourers in the Americas to the stolen Indigenous lands of Victoria’s Western District and the woollen mills of northern England.