How did blackness and whiteness figure in the patterns of life and represenation that moved across the eighteenth-century theatrical empire? Performances of blackface characters in colonial environments – in this case of Mungo, the enslaved Black Servant in the comic opera The Padlock – could take the lead in parsing, categorizing and enacting typologies of "darker-skinned" peoples with lasting effects – an embodied form of racial "knowledge" that undergirded the subordination of non-British peoples in the construction of a global laboring class.

The Introduction begins with the challenge of understanding the impact of settler colonialism on Victorian literary culture when it is largely invisible as a subject. It proposes that settler colonialism reveals common ground between the novel and political economy, centered on their shared investments in the Scottish Enlightenment’s stadial theory of societal development, which saw settled cultivation as the threshold to civilization, culture, and capital. Drawing on the claims of British world history, I argue that the cultural texts of settler colonialism were inseparable from its financial considerations throughout the Victorian period, while Franco Moretti’s model of “place-bound” genre offers a localized understanding of literary form that allows for the shaping influence of settler environments. When ideas of British subjectivity and society were challenged by events in Australia and New Zealand, writers responded through formal innovations in the novel and political economy. In addition, retracing imperial networks of influence and exchange brings to light the material pathways that allowed specific settler revisions of British identity to reshape metropolitan writing.

This chapter argues that the 1850s Australian gold rushes profoundly challenged the stadialist developmental logic underpinning political economy and novelistic realism. An initial response, Catherine Helen Spence’s Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854), cast gold digging in the language of romance, associated with financial speculation and social upheaval, and imagined the restoration of the stadialist norms of cultivation and culture. The emergence in Australia of the need for a new theory of subjectivity and society can be seen in W. E. Hearn’s Plutology: or, The Theory of the Efforts to Satisfy Human Wants (1864), which abandoned stadialism and labor in favor of a model of consumption based upon individual desire. The formal impact of such insights is also evident in works by metropolitan writers who had previously encountered the gold rushes. W. S. Jevons’ path-breaking “marginalist” Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s sensation novel John Caldigate (1878-79) both center upon and normativize a British subject defined by desire, and through this contribute to a newly deterritorialized understanding of British subjectivity.