Report On The State Of Agriculture And Trade In New South Wales

"Report on the State of Agriculture and Trade in New South Wales" is the third report by English judge and royal commissioner John Thomas Bigge on the state of affairs in the colonies. His inquiry started as several wealthy landowners, mainly John Macarthur, complained about the governorship of Lachlan Macquarie. The latter was famous for his policies of remediating ex-convicts back into society, creating a lack of a cheap and free workforce for the landowners. Bigge's reports condemned Macquarie for his emancipated views and support of ex-convicts, which led to Macquarie's resignation and turned the colonies into dreaded places of isolation and punishment for the convicts.

British Imperialism and Australia (1939) looks at the early economic history of Australia, which towards the end of the period under review became an important field of British Imperial development. The establishment of a peasant economy in New South Wales was attempted half a world away from the imperial architects, but war with revolutionary France interrupted the transportation of convicts and poor freemen, and in doing so gave the scheme a character quite unlike that originally envisaged by Pitt and Sydney.