Book review: Review of Wm Matthew Kennedy, The Imperial Commonwealth: Australia and the Project of Empire, 1867-1914

Transnational and imperial approaches to Australian history have been prominent for decades, yet even now we still hear calls for Australian history to focus on or within the nation-state. [...]we still see assumptions that, before and during Federation, nationalism somehow undermined Australia's attachment to the British empire. While much of the subject matter Kennedy covers has been studied by others, as he acknowledges, the book's freshness comes from assembling these topics together, and from his emphasis on Australians' pride in their own settler experience and claims to expertise as colonizers-which led to asserting a leadership role in the wider empire. A singular aspect of the book is Kennedy's argument that Australia became an empire in its own right, rather than a sub-empire or regional power within the larger British empire.