Resistance and Reform: Shared relationships and common interests among the subjects of criminal law in colonial New South Wales

Convict history, labour history and Indigenous history provide colonial historians with abundant evidence for charting and analysing the development of both Australian democracy and the coercive Australian state. These histories often focus on one or two subaltern social groups, to the exclusion of others, or, in some cases, on the conflicts between them. This article examines this historiography before introducing a new approach to the study of Australian colonial legal history which explores the commonalities shared by marginalised peoples, arising from a combination of class and ‘race’ dynamics. It does so specifically by analysing the social processes and patterns of resistance involved in the emergence of democratic majoritarian reform to criminal law throughout the period 1788 to 1861 — a subject of recent legal historical scholarship. Explored here is the notion of shared relationships and common interests as a theoretical device that deepens existing postcolonial understandings of who comprised the major subjects of colonial criminal law and the role they played in challenging and reforming it