This book is a comprehensive account of the development of Australia's colonial economy before the gold rushes. Noel Butlin's analysis of the developing economy provides background discussion of eighteenth-century British social, economic and military history, and detailed demographic analysis of the Australian population over sixty years. A key focus of the book is the extent to which the economy was independent or externally driven. Forming a Colonial Economy does for Australian history from 1810 to 1850 what Noel Butlin's previous landmark economic histories have done for the period from the 1860s to the 1890s.