Browse

The making of the modern world was a result of the fall of empires and the emergence of nation-states. This is particularly true across the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, a region connecting the Balkans to the Black Sea littoral, and the Middle East to the Caucasus. In approaching this poly-ethnic, multi-religious and trans-imperial hub of turmoil, the existing historiographies have either trivialized or idealized the role of rebels, revolutionaries and racketeers. Although revisionist scholarship has critically analysed political violence, imperialism and nation-state building, there is still a need to develop a comparative understanding of political actors that shaped the moments of political transition in these frontiers of empires. We accordingly propose a new genre of comparative and connected histories of rebels, revolutionaries and racketeers during what we call an “Age of Rogues.”

This book creatively explores the gold rushes in the Tasman World through an examination of the Otago gold rushes. It adopts a new methodology to reveal how transnational connections and local social and natural environments shaped colonial identities. The first monograph-length study on the Otago gold rushes and their place in the histories of British and Irish migration, it further increases our understanding of the British World by grounding transnational networks in the local ecologies, geologies and weather patterns which shaped local social structures and profoundly affected migrants' relationships to loved ones in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. In doing so, Gold Rush Societies evolves as neither a local nor a transnational history but one which blends the two into a single study and offers fresh perspectives on each in the process.