ABSTRACT
Until the last quarter of the eighteenth century Australia and its inhabitants had enjoyed for thousands of years a relatively peaceful existence, far removed from the main stream of world history. Just as historians of Australian history have wondered why the expansion of Asian influence stopped where it did, historians of European and world history have wondered why it was the inhabitants of Europe, a small offshoot of the Asian continent, who so completely imposed their stamp on the rest of the world and decisively altered the course of modern history. Europe was a strange society. The universalist Catholic Christian Empire, which followed the West Roman Empire, although internally deeply divided and fighting within itself, managed for more than a millennium to beat off invader after invader.
