Colonial Formations highlights the critical importance of colonial dynamics at the so-called peripheries of the British Empire.

Jane Carey teaches and researches across settler colonial, women's and Indigenous histories at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the editor of Re-Orienting Whiteness (2009), Creating White Australia (2009), and Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (2014).

Frances Steel teaches and researches Pacific and colonial history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She is the author of Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism, c. 1870-1914 (2011) and editor of New Zealand and the Sea: Historical Perspectives (2018).

Introduction: on the critical importance of colonial formations

Jane Carey and Frances Steel

1. The New South Wales Bar and Aboriginal people: making Aboriginal subjects c. 1830-1866

Paula Jane Byrne

2. 'A walk for our race': colonial modernity, Indigenous mobility and the origins of the Young Maori Party

Jane Carey

3. Potter v. Minahan: Chinese Australians, the law and belonging in White Australia

Kate Bagnall

4. The 'Chinese' always belonged

Peter Prince

5. 'I am a British subject': Indians in Australia claiming their rights, 1880-1940

Margaret Allen

6. Servant mobilities between Fiji and New Zealand: the transcolonial politics of domestic work and immigration restriction, c.1870-1920

Frances Steel

7. Anticolonialism and the politics of friendship in New Zealand's Pacific

Nicholas Hoare

8. The politics of friendship and cosmopolitan thought zones at the end of empire: Indian women's study tours to Europe 1934-38

Jane Haggis