would become materially enriched and the native unbelievers would become
‘enlightened’.
The significant early agents in this essentially economic conversion were not,
solely, the imperial administrators; they included the evangelist from Britain and
the entrepreneur from eastern North America. Not for them the logic of Adam
Smith, the reasoning of Karl Marx, or the science of Charles Darwin; they were
more in tune with the rectitude of John Locke (1690). His predication for the newly
emerging settler societies within a ‘labour theory of value’, was that whatever land
these incoming and God-fearing settler people secured and workedthey were enti-
tled to have and to hold in perpetuity. This was of course all very well for those
who wanted to ‘hear’ what Locke had to say; but it was based on the unproven
hypothesis that natural labour somehow adhered an incoming person to the land
base on which that labour was performed, regardless of the landscape’s histori-
cal pattern of indigenous ownership.
To paraphrase the transatlantic and later the transpacific perspective relative to
the aboriginal peoples: take on the appropriate attitude, hand over your land
(usually for nothing or for dross) and your circumstance will be transformed into
an improved end state. By this logic was born a normative model for develop-
ment which attracted religious zealots who brought in their wake a baggage of
mostly poor opportunists, escapists and romanticists, a raffish admixture which
laid foundations for the questing, individualistic, independent, and above all con-
sumerist Anglo New World. Their paradigm grew from a transatlantic set of
‘ordained’ superiorities and ‘civilizing’ purposes, which included a settler over-
lordship of natural resources. This began an ever-quickening process, a chain of
events in which the instruments for growth became stronger year by year. Science,
during the late nineteenth century, was the handmaiden to evolutionary advance.^7
The period of land capture in the Anglo New World coincided with the begin-
ning of the modern carbon-fuel era, in relation to which Guha (1991) observed
that ‘for the first time in human history, societies were living not on the current
income from nature but on nature’s capital itself’. The settler people’s rectitude
led them to believe that they exhibited the ‘right’ attitudes – self-reliance and an
adaptive frame of mind. The indigenous first peoples survived by a thread.
Decimated by disease and subjugation, they declined in both numbers and
identity. Over the same period the dominantly settler population became struc-
turally mature in a demographic sense, more urban and urbane, gender-balanced,
and progressively more bureaucratized.An objective review of these mainly nineteenth-century values shows them to be
flawed – hollow, avaricious, misguided and extortionate. The settler society of the
Anglo New World evolved a conformist mantle of rectitude. In these terms settler
endeavours can be judged as self-serving and pretentious, along with a recogni-
tion of some accidental excellence, Grand Plans in an era when their European
contemporaries were making their Grand Tours, providing optimistic hope out of
the Industrial Revolution, by good example Out West and Down Under.^8
This appeal to history for an indication of the path ahead throws up indicators.
That of a Smith–Rostow (1776 and 1960) character profiles the ‘hidden hand’ as78 Practice