Part of the History Department Research Seminar series.
From the late 1840s, the discovery of previously unimagined quantities of gold in California and then in the Australian colonies had a marked influence on the economic, social, and cultural history of Victorian Britain. By 1860, the gold rushes had transformed Britain’s relationship with the Pacific, helped to reshape metropolitan thinking about the future of British expansion, and established important precedents for subsequent gold rushes across the British Empire. At the centre of this story was the unprecedented movement of people to and from the goldfields of California and Australia.
Gold Fever struck mid-Victorian Britain hard. A first wave from California in 1849 was closely followed by a new Australian strain in 1851. Amidst the excitement of the Pacific gold rushes, a small minority achieved remarkable success, marked by the discovery of transformative individual wealth. But for most British goldseekers the reality was rather more modest. As the fever subsided, and their gilded dreams dissolved, they were forced to confront the extravagance of their ambitions, and varying degrees of failure.
This paper explores the role of failure in shaping the British experience on the goldfields of California and Australia. Drawing on new research in British, American, and Australian archives, it offers fresh insights on the impacts of the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes upon Victorian Britain and its global and imperial orientation.
Benjamin Mountford (ACU)
Ben Mountford is Director of the Centre for Regional Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (RHASS) and Associate Professor of History at Australian Catholic University. He is the author of the award-winning Britain, China and Colonial Australia (OUP 2016), has co-edited three books in the fields of global and imperial history, and was co-editor of the journal History Australia 2022-24. Ben is currently working on a history of how the nineteenth century gold rushes impacted Victorian Britain.