Unhappy Mr. Peel
Instruments are technologies, means-to-ends. Systems made to repeatably produce a result or affect. The category ‘instrument’ isn’t something inherently physical though. They proliferate wildly across the fields of music, science, law, technology, finance, capital. They might be better described as a set of social relations, established by the kinds of uses that the object can be put to. In this definition, ‘instrument’ is always contextual, historically specific. A drum machine that makes a tacky, synthesised impression of a drum kit in the 80s, becomes an auratic, hyper-commoditised object in the 2010s. The material object stayed the same throughout. But under a new social condition, it becomes a different kind of instrument.
Nineteenth century European agriculture comprised instruments such as seed drills, horse-drawn ploughs, and selectively-bred stock. Then, legal instruments were put in place to enclose and privatise public farmland. The new landowners bought these instruments of agriculture, and compelled labourers to work them for a wage, turning profits for their owners. This is the capitalist mode of prodution. In this setting, those instruments of agriculture become capital. But those instruments are not always, inherently capital. Under a new social condition, outside of the capitalist mode of production, they can become something else. In other words, there is no capital without capitalism.
British settlers invaded Whadjuk-Noongar country in 1829 and founded the colony of Swan River; now known as Perth or Boorloo, where I live. They brought huge amounts of capital. But they forgot to bring capitalism. The events of the next few months formed a loosely-held narrative from which two political traditions diverge, both with great historical consequence. One was from Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a colonist who died in obscurity but was a leading political economist for a time. The other was from Karl Marx. In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx describes the events as such:
“[Wakefield] discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3000 [sic, 400] persons of the working-class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’ Unhappy Mr. Peel who provided for everything except the export of English modes of production to Swan River!”
It’s a juicy morsel for a city entombed in cultural cringe. Without context, it’s satisfying enough—Marx was a great ironist and relished dunking on aristocrats. Working backwards from here, however, you quickly find Marx wasn’t sarcastic enough. This is an attempt to reconstruct the context. A short history of the instruments of capital in Western Australia.
In 1820s Britain, Australian colonialism was shedding its penal colony image and emerging as a lucrative property investment. Convicts sent to New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) were becoming wealthy free men with abundant land, under a scheme that gave upwards of 30 acres freely to almost anyone. This was appealing to one Mr. Thomas Peel and the wealthy gentlemen’s clubs he frequented. Mr. Peel was by all accounts an entitled, conniving, talentless man, born into a British dynasty built on cotton plantations and mechanised looms. His cousin once-removed was Sir Robert Peel, secretary of state and later prime minister. This connection made him sought after as a frontman, so to speak, for associations of investors to pool their capital. A veneer of nepotistic privilege.
Meanwhile, the colonist James Stirling was at the continent’s west surveying the Swan River. Whadjuk-Noongar people had inhabited the region for at least 45,000 years. Their sophisticated agriculture and aquaculture systems provided food for thousands. Europeans had visited the site for over a hundred years and each time declared it barren. Stirling thought otherwise, but not out of any respect for Noongar sovereignty. He saw opportunity for great political power and great property investment. His name on streets, towns, parks, mountain ranges; names that would still be fought over today. In his report for the British Colonial Office he wrote of abundant fresh water, high-quality soil, and temperate summers. From the perspective of British agriculture, these are fatal exaggerations.
The Colonial Office was intrigued, but hesitant to fund any new settlements. Stirling met with Mr. Peel’s association of investors and convinced them of the Swan River’s lucrative potential. They proposed a sort of experiment in privatised colonisation. In exchange for bringing 10,000 settlers—no convicts—and sufficient capital to start an agricultural export industry, the Crown would grant them four million acres. An area slightly smaller than that of Occupied Palestine. This would be divided into lots of 200 acres given to each settler family, followed by public amenities like a harbour, with the remainder as investment properties. The Colonial Office assented, but to only half a million acres total. All investors the deserted except Mr. Peel, who had already purchased a ship with his father’s money. Stirling was happy enough, guaranteed 100,000 acres of his choosing. The media were sensationalised by the idyllic image Stirling had evoked. Interest in emigration to Swan River briefly eclipsed all that of North America. Swan River was proclaimed the gated suburb of the future. Home of the maali, the black swan, hitherto a metaphor for the impossible. With a few hundred settlers, Australia’s first ‘free colony’ was annexed there in June. Stirling was its first governor.
Unhappy Mr. Peel formed a new Association with a New South Welsh investor, and struck a less ambitious deal that would grant him 250,000 acres along the southern bank of the Swan River, on the conditions that he bring a workforce of at least 400, and that he do so by November or this parcel of land will be sold to someone else. Mr. Peel drew up a contract for his settlers. “The Association propose to furnish Stores, Agricultural Instruments, Farm Stock, Seed, and every other supply necessary for a New Settlement,” he wrote. In exchange for this and the cost of transportation, the workers will be indentured servants to him for five years, paid a salary of three to five shillings a day for nine-hour workdays. Upon completion of their indenture, he would grant farms between 200 and 1000 acres for them and their family. Hundreds of families applied. One news report called Mr. Peel “a second Noah.”
Mr. Peel departed in July but arrived in late December, six weeks after his deadline elapsed and his promised land was sold on. Furious and with no other options, his indentures and him sailed south to what is now Woodman Point (Coogee Beach), and founded the town of Clarence there at the end of January 1830. They erected tents and a makeshift store, pending formal surveying and town planning. Mr. Peel hated the location. Some time in these early months he lost use of his right hand. It’s likely he was shot in a duel by a disgruntled captain of one of the wrecked ships that had brought them to ruin. The town plans were never finished, and a better townsite was not found. Despondent and resentful at his plummeting investment, he spent less and less time at Clarence, preferring the company of the navy officers or his lonely homestead several kilometres away.
The indentures were stuck. They couldn’t farm anything in the summer or in the low-nutrient soil. Good drinking water was scarce. Subsistence on the land was out of the question. Mr. Peel paid their salaries with promissory notes, legal instruments that promised payment when his investor brought capital and money from Sydney. Unbeknownst to them, his investor had pulled out of the deal just after Mr. Peel left England. Heard word from the first ship back to London that Swan River was a wasteland. The promissory notes were worthless. Mr. Peel sold their capital and building supplies to Fremantle for food. The people of Clarence were in open revolt. But with no money, no means of subsistence, no other settlement to take them in, and no decisiveness from their master, they stayed put through autumn. Between January and May, twenty-nine settlers in Clarence had died, mostly of dysentery or scurvy. Stirling compelled Mr. Peel to emancipate them all. Clarence was disassembled and abandoned, nine months after its founding.
In an otherwise sympathetic biography, Alexandra Hasluck writes that Mr. Peel’s name “had become a byword for a colossal failure.” He went on to murder up to 80 Binjareb-Noongar people in the Pinjarra Massacre. A dawn ambush led by Captain Stirling on Indigenous families. Kettled into the Murray River where they were shot or drowned. The region is named after him. There are no known photographs of Mr. Peel. One cartoon has him wringing a swan’s throat. Plucking its plumage to feather his own nest. He died aged 72 after eating too many fermented figs.
Mr. Peel was incompetent, but Edward Gibbon Wakefield was despicable. Twice, he eloped with teenage heiresses, “a method of coming into command of money,” Hasluck writes, “that apparently struck him as quick and easy.” The second time, he lured her from school by saying her mother was sick, kidnapped her, and forcibly married her. For this, he was jailed for three years. The marriage was annulled by an act of parliament.
Prison was as kind on the wealthy as it is today. They received the best quarters, food, and periodicals. Through the latter he became absorbed in colonial politics. In mid-1829, while still incarcerated, he published a pamphlet and several letters-to-the-editor on Australia and America’s colonial woes. He lamented that colonists have “degenerated from their ancestors,” who “delight in a forced equality, not equality before the law only, but equality against nature and truth.” He diagnosed the problem as an over-abundance of land at too cheap a price. An unnatural aberration from the British social order, where all but the ruling class were locked out of property ownership and forced into wage-labour. His writing was popular. It immediately held sway at both the Colonial Office and Parliament. He entered prison a child kidnapper, and left a leading political economist.
Word from Swan River spread quickly in the old world. The story was almost the perfect strawman for Wakefield to prove his theory. In his 1833 treatise England and America, he took hearsay from Clarence, embellished the plot and exaggerated the numbers at every point, and built a novel economic case for imperial expansion that is still felt today.
Wakefield’s version of events is kind of a hodge-podge mixture of Clarence’s history, Swan River Colony’s history, and bourgeois tragedy, assimilated into one convenient narrative. In Wakefield’s telling, Swan River settlement is widely spaced out because its settlers had already been given their allotted land freely or cheaply. This distance between settlers’ properties and the townsite fomented an unwillingness to undertake wage-labour when they could happily subsist by farming their own land. Mr. Peel, the well-meaning capitalist with more than enough capital and 500,000 acres of his choosing, couldn’t compel his subordinates to work for him as they all worked their own lands. Hence, Mr. Peel was left “without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water.” When the settlers’ crops failed—due to lack of labour, not the gruelling weather or soil conditions—they hopelessly came to Mr. Peel begging for work and food, food he did not have. When food and rations finally came from Sydney, settlers couldn’t be located due to their long distance and the lack of roads, roads that would’ve been built by wage-labourers if there were any. Settlers allegedly starved to death.
This narrative is full of half-truths. No one starved to death, nor could settlers not be found as maps were well documented and roads were marked. Mr. Peel got half that acreage, and it wasn’t of his choosing. He wasn’t beset by his servants for not benevolently bestowing work on them, but because he incompetently handled the entire project and used oppressive contracts as collateral. Swan River’s main settlement stagnated, but faired somewhat better. Wakefield nonetheless uses this narrative to come to a false and facile conclusion:
These [Swan River settlers], one of whose chief inducements to settling in this colony was an undertaking from the English government that no convicts should be sent thither, are now begging for a supply of convict labour. They want slaves. They want labour which shall be constant and liable to combination in particular works.… Not having convict labour, they will long for African slaves; and would obtain them, too, if public opinion in England did not forbid it.
At this stage no one in Swan River was calling for convict or slave labour. Settlers were proudly individualist, but willing to do public works for a fair wage, that the Colonial Office wouldn’t give, nor would Captain Stirling ask for due to his own diminishing pride. Wakefield performatively hated slavery. He thought it was bad for capitalism. But a working class of wage-labourers, dispossessed of property, was the engine of his ideology. Give them free land and they will leave the workforce to subsist on farming. But the urge to profit from this property will inevitably grow, and with that a demand for labour. With no pool of labour to exploit, property owners will demand slaves or convicts. “The failure of this last experiment in colonisation will have one good effect,” Wakefield writes, “if it help to teach the English and Americans, that the original and permanent cause of slavery is superabundance of good land.” There are several issues with his deduction here. Marx will get to them later.
Since reimposing slavery was out of the question, he proposed a solution called systematic colonisation. The core tenets are this: the British government sends a continuous and steady supply of labourers to the colonies. An artificial “sufficient price” is placed on available land in the colony. This “sufficient price” must be high enough to be unaffordable for labourers with no savings. The funds generated from these sales go towards bringing more labourers and capital from the old world. Investors in the colonies are thus guaranteed surplus labour, strong public amenities, and quick development of their properties. It is the reproduction of English, capitalist modes of production. Despite its inherent conservatism, the idea was quite radical at the time. Adam Smith’s classical liberal, small-government, free-market principles were the dominant orthodoxy—one which didn’t see colonialism as economically beneficial anyway. Wakefield’s proposal was a welcome change in the wind. A massive, artificial government intervention that went against free market principles to produce profitable, capitalist colonies.
Wakefield wasn’t the genius of political economy he saw himself to be, but was a very persistent entrepreneur of his ideology. He formed several investment companies inspired by systematic colonisation, and published hundreds of pamphlets promoting it in a few years. One company was the South Australia Company, which fancied colonising Kaurna land, now Adelaide. They were initially funded by speculative investors who’d purchased property there before the site of Adelaide was even confirmed or surveyed. Within four years of first settlement, Adelaide’s settler population was triple that of Swan River. This artificial boom would not last. By then, Wakefield moved onto New Zealand, where the legacy of systematic colonisation is felt most profoundly and damagingly. Up until this point he hadn’t considered the possibility of Aboriginal or Maori sovereignty—his definition of colonisation being “the creation and increase of everything but land, where there is nothing except land.” Terra nullius. He re-cast his ideology as a white supremacist moral necessity, “reclaiming and cultivating a moral wilderness—that of civilizing a barbarous people by means of a deliberate plan and systematic efforts.” The companies he founded to administer systematic colonisation all collapsed within a decade. Gold rushes in North America and Australia made the theory redundant. He died in relative obscurity in Wellington in 1862. He is memorialised appropriately.
Six years after Wakefield’s death and thirty-four years after England and America was published, Marx published the first volume of Capital. Its final chapter, “The Modern Theory of Colonisation,” is a sharp rejoinder of Wakefield. It isn’t a victory lap either. It distils in its most elegant, pointed form, the conditions from which capitalism emerge. The story of Swan River reveals the secret of capitalism’s maintenance: the seizure of property and the means of production from the labourer, also known as expropriation.
“The Modern Theory of Colonisation” is the last of a five-chapter study on the concept of primitive accumulation, the theory of the origins of capitalism. How do some people come to possess more than others? When Adam Smith first explored the question in The Wealth of Nations, he created a pre-modern narrative where the hardest, most innovative workers inevitably accumulated more resources than the less able ones. As they accumulated more resources, they accumulated more property, which accumulated more capital. In their wake were the workers who had nothing but their labour to sell to them. For Smith, this is the natural social order. A fait accompli. A society of lifters and leaners (in Australian politicians’ terms). Marx finds many problems here. It implies that primitive accumulation was a long-ago, foregone conclusion, and not an ongoing, evolving structure. And it belies the obvious corruptibility of power. “In actual history,” he writes, “it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. … The methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.” So he redefines primitive accumulation as the historical and ongoing process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. In nineteenth century Britain, this is enacted by legal instruments that enclose public farmland, and give private citizens or firms full jurisdiction over it. Then it is enforced by instruments of a more physically violent kind: walls, firearms, police, prisons. In modern Marxist studies primitive accumulation is referred to more appropriately as accumulation by dispossession. Settler colonialism and accumulation by dispossession are similar structures.
Marx begins “The Modern Theory of Colonisation” by describing the tendency of political economics to conflate property that the producer owns and labours on, with property that employs the labour of others. One is an instrument of subsistence. The other is capital. Only the latter expropriates the labourer. If labourers own and work their own productive land, then they are not motivated to sell their labour to the capitalists. The capitalist can have all the capital in the world, but without wage-labour, it will not be capital.
This is exactly what Wakefield declared as his own brilliant contribution to political economics, the cause of all the problems of Swan River. “It is the great merit of E.G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother-country,” Marx writes. The Swan River narrative is then laid out. Unhappy Mr. Peel, the good capitalist with good capital but no capitalism. Marx’s crocodile tears arguably memorialised Mr. Peel more than all the regions in Western Australia named after him.
Again, Marx’s reading of the abortive Swan River is Wakefield’s embellished, half-true version. It’s not like settler-colonial Australia was a non-capitalist or pre-capitalist society. To call Clarence either would give it the credit of being a functional society. Class was still reproduced. Wealthier settlers still brought servants; Mr. Peel still dined with the navy officers while the paupers died in tents. Incompetence caused Clarence’s demise and Swan River’s stagnation, not free land. Marx and Wakefield more or less agree on the diagnosis: accumulation by dispossession had been disrupted at Swan River. But Wakefield wanted to start it back up. It was the necessary precondition for the civilised capitalist mode of production could flourish in the colonies, and bring profits to the Crown.
Wakefield’s idea of primitive accumulation is similar to Smith’s. Mankind ‘naturally’ divides itself between owners of capital and owners of labour. But if this theory holds, why intervene in the colonies at all? Surely a terra nullius land would be the ideal situation for mankind in its natural state to flourish? No, Wakefield says, because no one in the colonies is willing to expropriate themselves, and no one can enforce otherwise. This apparently explains the “degenerate” status of settlers that Wakefield detested. The social order has been scrapped. A better explanation is that Wakefield feared social revolution. Being incarcerated brought him into contact with the people who had the most to gain from revolt. If capital is dispersed to everyone equally, capitalists will have a revolution on their hands. Of course, Marx wouldn’t mind that at all.
Capitalism always produces a population of wage-labourers, but one of Marx’s achievements in Capital was his proof that it also always produces a slight surplus of wage-labourers. A proportion of unemployed workers. In Europe, this is taken for granted. Surplus labour means capital can be deployed quickly, wage-labourers found quickly and put to work. But in the colonies there is no surplus labour. The supply of indentured labour brought to Swan River disappeared into independence sooner than could be replenished. They became independent farmers or artisans, “who work for themselves instead of for capital, and enrich themselves instead of the capitalist gentry,” Marx writes. Work without exploitation, or dependence on the capitalist. “Hence all the inconveniences that our E.G. Wakefield pictures so doughtily, so eloquently, so pathetically.”
Marx’s analysis is only meant to prove the point that capitalism relies on the ongoing expropriation of the labourer. It does not propose a ‘better’ form of colonisation. He is aware that a colony full of independent landowner-producers is, as Gabriel Piterberg and Lorenzo Veracini write, “an alluring, but dangerous alternative to embracing a revolutionary consciousness.” They have none of the collective power that the expropriated working class have. Marx probably didn’t see an opportunity for revolution in Swan River. With one or two exceptions, his interest in the colonies, settler colonialism, or European domination over Indigenous sovereignty, didn’t go further than this.
The Swan River colony finally relented to the demand for cheap labour in 1849, with a watered-down version of systematic colonisation that we tend to call the convict era of Western Australia. Nine thousand convicts brought from the old world over two decades. They built most of the heritage buildings in the state and much of the roads. Including the buildings they were incarcerated in, like Perth Gaol and Fremantle Prison. Built under the long shadow of systematic colonisation. When the British government wrapped up convict transportation in 1869, Western Australia protested loudly. But by this point an expropriated working class was firmly established. Boorloo/Perth now houses 2 million people, spread out over 6400 square kilometres. Wakefield’s vision is complete. An entrenched unaffordability of property. An entrenched culture of property investment. A politic that accepts the ‘lifters and leaners’ parable as orthodoxy. One in fifteen Indigenous men in the state incarcerated, for failing to assimilate to the English social order. Perth isn’t unique or exceptional on any of those points. It goes to show how successfully English modes of production were reproduced around the world.
Sam Barnett, the son of the conservative former premier of WA Colin Barnett, is an action figure 3D-printed exclusively to piss me off. His dad’s premiership (2008-2017) maintained a special interest in the northern half of WA. Conservative politicians love the north. It’s not as commercially developed as the south west, where some 90% of the state’s population is concentrated. It’s all untapped extraction and exploitation to them. Unfettered mining grants and luxury resorts. His northern policies ranged from comedy (a 3700km freshwater canal to Perth) to apartheid (threatening to cut off water supply and electricity to remote Indigenous communities). While his dad was premier, Sam Barnett bought 100 hectares of beachfront property near Kalbarri for only $140,000 in cash, and promised to buy another 300 hectares at an adjacent lot. He intended to set up a glamping retreat, promoting his investments in China where he used his dad’s image in his presentations. In the last five years he’s had violence restraining orders on two women, and smashed the laptop and phone of another. All slaps on the wrist, spent convictions. Last year he allegedly purchased 350 hectares near Kununurra in the far north. Told the media he planned to import tigers and start an exotic zoo. There was temporary sensationalist media coverage. Australia’s own Tiger King, et cetera. A month later, he confessed that it was a publicity stunt. A ploy to promote a TV docuseries about his stupid little life. The media, he moans, have had it out for him for years. Unhappy Mr. Barnett, who provided nothing.