Ernest Scott worked as a journalist on the London Globe before migrating to Australia in 1892, where he joined the staff of The Herald newspaper in Melbourne. The publication of Terre Napoleon (1910) and Laperouse (1912) established his reputation as a historian. La Perouse, Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de (1741-1788) was a French Navy officer and explorer whose expedition vanished in Oceania. He studied in a Jesuit college and entered the naval college when he was fifteen. He was on a second supply expedition in 1758 to that besieged fortress which was forced to make a circuitous route...

The publication in 1933 of the Australia volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire was a landmark in historical interpretation of the nation and its place in the world. To coincide with the Australian Bicentenary in 1988, Cambridge University Press reissued this book in an unaltered edition. For this reissue Professor Geoffrey Bolton contributed a specially commissioned introduction assessing the importance, historical context and legacy of the volume.

Ernest Scott (1867 1939) emigrated to Australia in 1892, settling in Melbourne where he worked as a journalist. In 1913 he was appointed Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. This volume, first published in 1910, discusses the aims and outcome of the survey of the south Australian coast performed by Nicholas Baudin's French expedition between 1800 and 1804, and established Scott's reputation as a historian. Scott traces the path of Baudin's expedition along the then unexplored south coast of Australia, estimating the amount of original surveying performed by the expedition to...