I don't recall exactly when this happened, but at some point in my intellectual life I developed an interest in comparing and contrasting human beings, human societies, and human cultures. I suspect that my increasing interest in comparative studies during my undergraduate years initially derived from my work in Biblical Studies, a discipline that required an attentiveness to broader Near Eastern culture and to broader Mediterranean culture in general.
My interest in comparative studies didn't end with Biblical Studies, however. It seemed to me that an interest in the study of humanity required that one explore human prehistory and history from a variety of disciplinary standpoints including Anthropology, Sociology, History, Culture Studies, Social Psychology, Biology, Environmental Studies, and beyond. As a consequence of this broadening out of my interests, my intellectual life suddenly changed direction and focus sometime in the 1980s as I was entering graduate school.
My interest in comparative human studies was certainly one of reasons I was drawn to take a master's degree in Cultural Anthropology, a discipline that attempts to look at humans through the lens of biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological holism or wholeism. My interest in comparative studies was also behind my growing interest in Comparative Historical Sociology and Comparative History. I became particularly interested in the comparative study of English and British settler societies like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. If one wants to understand these societies and cultures, past or present, it seemed obvious to me, one had to compare them with what they were and are most like. If one wanted to understand the history of the United States, for instance, it seemed obvious to me that one needed to compare it to what it was most like, namely the other English and British settler societies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand
Because of these broad interests I had a problem finding a disciplinary box that I could fit into and which fit me. Anthropology limited the comparative study of human society and culture to "exotic" traditional societies and cultures and anthropologists, at the time, looked askance at anyone who wanted to study modern core nation societies and cultures. Atheoretical History made doing comparative studies difficult because it parcelled out humans into little fetishised boxes of states and nation-states that novice historians were supposed to specialise in. Sociology, as taught in the US, tended to focus on, in typical naval gazing fashion, on the US. I did not realise for some time that there was a discipline out there in academialand, a discipline that paralls wholistic Anthropology, that would have allowed me to act on my holistic interests had I been aware of it, Geography. If I had been aware of Geography and specifically of its subdisciplines of Historical Geography and Cultural Geography, subdisciplines that were somewhat comparative and attentive to the five factors that affect human groups--economics, culture, demography, and politics-- I woud have taken my postgraduate degree in it.
As someone attracted to the comparative study of English and British settler societies I finally got around to reading something I should have read years ago, J.M. Powell's seminal An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Resitive Fringe (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Powell's book, which is more of a series of related essays on the history of Australian environment, the human adaptation to and transformation of that environment, Australian politics, Australian economic history, and Australian cultural history, than your typical textbook history of Australia, allows anyone with a basic understanding of US and Canadian histories, to compare and contrast these three English and British settler societies across time and across space.
Reading An Historical Geography of Modern Australia from the vantage point of the history of English and British Settler Societies Studies, one quickly fastens on several fascinating similarities between Australia, Canada, and the United States. There is, for example, the fact that all three are the products of European and more specifically English and European geographical imperialism. There is the common federalism that often plays out in tensions between the federal government and the state and provincial governments and sometimes leads to threats of secession. There is the common notions of manifest destiny with its emphasis on settlement from sea to shining sea even when such settlement was and is geographically problematic. There is the common notion of chosenness, messianism, and exceptionalism (variations on human ethnocentrism) that all three settler societies shared and share, notions that were and are tied to ideologies of progress and to imperialism and racism. There is the common notion of White supremacy amongst all three societies, an ethnocentric ideology that led to limits on who could immigrate to Australia, Canada, and the US until the post-World War II period. There is the shared manichean and binary ideology of bush or frontier good, cities bad. There is the shared emphasis on Lockean individualism and the yeoman farmer. There is the common notion in all three nations that economic growth is a good, something that aided and abetted the massive transformation of the environment that characterised and still characterises all three nations. There were the common gold rushes. There is the common environmental limits on settlement patterns particularly with respect to Australia and Canada, though when Americans reached the Plains and the deserts it too faced geographical barriers to settlement. Needless to say, some, many, and perhaps most of these similarities can be traced back to the hearth of the mother country.
There are also, of course, differences between the English and British settler societies of Australia, the US, and Canada. Australia, for instance, as Powell notes, has long been, given down under environmental realities, quite urban. Interestingly, despite being an urban nation almost since its beginnings, Australians celebrated and continue, to some extent, to celebrate the macho rural Aussie of the bush as the epitome of Australianess.
For anyone interested in the history and historical geography of Commonwealth Australia and comparative English and British settler society studies, Powell's book, despite its age, is essential reading. Highly recommended.
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