[sdurkin]

Overpopulation was actually a major problem for Britain for most of its history, (hence the continent-sized penal colony in Australia.)

It was just that British immigrants had the nasty habit of overthrowing the government in their new homes.

[brc]

> continent-sized penal colony in Australian

Highly inaccurate.

Accurate : 4 or small 5 penal settlements in a vastly empty continent with only a few hundred thousand native inhabitants started the colonies of Australia. The main reasons for convict settlement in Australia were (a) the loss of the USA in the revolutionary war and, as such, the need for new colonial holdings to offset this loss, and (b) the need to establish a permanent settlement on the continent to cement the claim made 18 years earlier by Captain Cook. It's a little known fact that a French expeditionary force also landed in modern-day Sydney the day after the 'first fleet' landed and erected the Union Jack.

Tiny numbers of convicts (164,000) were transported over a 80 year period from 1788. This is against estimates of the England/Wales population of 8.5 million people, and you can see that transportation wasn't really a useful way of reducing the English population - certainly not as such a great expense when execution was just as effective and a whole lot cheaper (and regularly handed out by magistrates)

Also compare the convict numbers to numbers of people arriving for the Gold rush - 370,000 in 1852 alone - and you can see that while Convicts make for a great story, they really aren't a large part of the story.

So the true story of Australia was that it's foundation as a European colony were more to do with establishing new colonies after the loss of the revolutionary war than it was in reducing english population. The shipping of convicts merely met two aims simultaneously : establishing a colony with forced labour and removing the eyesore prison hulks being used as prisons. It didn't meaningfully help in reducing the overpopulation or unemployment in England. That was eventually solved by free immigration in large numbers to both Australia and the USA/Canada.

[mambodog]

It was just that British immigrants had the nasty habit of overthrowing the government in their new homes.

How many countries did that happen in?

[krschultz]

If you count native populations as the local government, then basically every single colony England setup.

[dctoedt]

The U.S. itself. Indirectly, Texas and California. Rhodesia.

Any others?

[Gormo]

Bengal. If you count Texas and California, then Hawaii as well.

Of course, if you compare the British to other colonial powers, they also did a significant amount to preserve the local culture, even when assuming sovereign power from the local states.