| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

John Gascoigne. The Enlightenment and the Origins of European Australia. Assisted by Patricia Curthoys. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xiii, 233. $65.00.
In this book, John Gascoigne and Patricia Curthoys attempt an ambitious exercise in combining Western European intellectual history and the settlement history of colonial Australia. They engage in a survey of some of the key ideas that flowed from the European Enlightenment, especially the urge toward "improvement," and demonstrate the extent to which these influences can be discerned affecting the ways in which British settler communities imagined their new country and attempted to relate to it. It is the thesis of the book that ideas of improvement originally derived from the sphere of agriculture also contributed to attitudes and policies that were implemented in colonial Australia in areas such as penal theory, education, relationships with the Aborigines, and attitudes toward the land itself.	1
The first section of the book is a summary of the Enlightenment, especially in English-speaking lands and the ways in which attitudes and behaviors that were the product of ideas like improvement and progress played a largely unrecognized but formative role in Australian developments from 1788 to the mid-nineteenth century. Gascoigne points out that many Australian historians have given cursory acknowledgement to the importance of Enlightenment ideas in the Australian colonies without exploring their impact in depth. This book is therefore a useful study of a much-neglected area of Australia's intellectual history.	. . .

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