Three Rebellions: Canada 1837-1838, South Wales 1839 and Victoria, Australia 1854 (The Rebellions Trilogy)

`Three Rebellions Canada 1837-1836, South Wales 1839 and Australia 1854 is indeed an ambitious study telling its story in around a thousand pages of description and analysis supported throughout with illustrations and maps.....Richard Brown has written a well documented, thoroughly argued and especially interesting book.' John Rule, University of Southampton
Three Rebellions considers the context, causes, consequences and commemoration of three major popular disturbances in the British Empire during the early years of Queen Victoria's long reign: in the Canadas during 1837 and 1838; at Newport in South Wales in 1839, and at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat, Victoria in Australia in 1854. These flash points, when thousands of largely working people took up arms against the forces of colonial rule, marked the advent of a new form of popular constitutionalism, one linked to British radicalism and especially to Chartism. Though the rebellions failed when faced by the overwhelming force of the colonial state, they nonetheless each played a significant role in the emergence of more responsive and responsible government. Today, ironically, the vanquished are better remembered than victors.

The author, through a detailed and exhaustive examination of the available sources has provided a new approach and perspective to political developments in the three regions of Britain's empire in the first six decades of the nineteenth century. Three Rebellions will appeal to historians and general readers interested in the question of how and why Canada and Australia, two of the most important white-settler colonies, achieved a form of self-government when reform in Britain took much longer. It also provides analysis of the global impact of British radicalism and the ways in which its ideas were transposed to the colonies and modified by that experience