Laureate Centre for History and Population, 26 Sep 2025
Histories of pastoralism and histories of populations represent two central streams within the historiography of Australia, New Zealand Aotearoa, and the British Empire more broadly. Both livestock (living and as commodified bodily products) and humans criss-crossed the globe, driving colonial expansion, and remaking landscapes, economies, and diets. Later historiography has largely separated out the ways that nineteenth century thinkers on political economy and colonisation frequently thought about livestock and populations together, in terms of food, reproduction and occupation of land.
This small gathering of scholars with backgrounds in animal history, cultural history, environmental history, business history and settler colonial history will reunite these strands to explore what it means to include sheep and cattle in the histories of populations on the Australian continent up to the granting of responsible government to all the colonies (apart from Western Australia) in the mid to late 1850s.
