‘New’ Histories of (Australian) Capitalism
BEN HUF AND GLENDA SLUGA
In the decade since the Great Recession of 2007–2008, ‘capitalism’ has re-emerged as a
pervasive framework for understanding a world in momentous flux.1 Across the globe, a
torrent of public-minded scholarship has debated the past, present, future and end of
capitalism in an effort to grapple with the endemic challenges of poverty, automation,
inqualities of wealth and ecological crisis.2 Historians have positioned themselves at the fore
of these debates. In the United States, ‘new histories of capitalism’ are now the premise of a
field of study with undergraduate courses, conferences, research centres and intitatives.3
In
Britain, Germany and other European countries, scholars are adopting a ‘new materialism’,
‘material turn’ and ‘new labour history’ for their courses and publications.4 They are applying
lessons from social and cultural history to business, labour and economic history’s traditional
actors and topics. By cross-pollinating methodologies from the social sciences, these histories
are ‘re-embedding’ economic relations and actors in structures of law, institutions, social
norms, knowledge, and power. These trends have been put at the service of larger questions
addressing three hundred years of economic transformations that have delivered immense
prosperity but at unrivalled social and environmental cost.5
This special issue of Australian Historical Studies shifts the spotlight onto similar
conversations underway in the Australian context, with the aim of stimulating and extending
the relevance of these disciplinary trends to Australian history. It follows a 2017 issue of this
journal which published articles outlining a program for a ‘new materialism’ in Australian
historiography and advocating economic history be reclaimed as a site of interdisciplinary
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
1
Jürgen Kocka and Marcel van der Linden, eds, Capitalism. The Re-emergence of a Historical Concept
(London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
2 For example, Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, and Craig Calhoun,
Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
3 Kenneth Lipartito, ‘Reassembling the Economic: New Departures in Historical Materialism’, American
Historical Review 121, no. 1 (February 2016): 101–39; Sven Beckett and Christine Desan, eds, American
Capitalism: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
4 William H. Sewell, ‘A strange career: The historical study of economic life’, History and Theory 49, no.4
(2010): 146–66; Kate Smith, ‘Amidst New Things: New Histories of Commodities, Capital and Consumption’,
The Historical Journal 61, no.3 (2018): 841-861; Bryan D. Palmer, ‘“Mind Forg’d Manacles” and Recent
Pathways to “New” Labor Histories’, International Review of Social History 62 (2017): 279–303; Werner
Plumpe, Friedrich Lenger and Jürgen Kocka,‘Capitalism as a Problem of Historiography’, Journal of Modern
European History 15, no. 4 (2017): 457–88.
5 William H. Sewell, ‘The Capitalist Epoch’, Social Science History 38, no. 1–2 (2014): 1–11.
2
research.6 The contributions to this current special issue develop these lines of inquiry, with a
refined thematic focus on Australian experiences of capitalism in colonial, regional, national
and transnational settings. Our aim is to profile an Australian historiography re-engaging
capitalism as a mode of inquiry and partaking in an international dialogue that seeks to
address problems pertinent to our times.
Capitalism is an evocative term, at once ambiguous and indispensable, as R.H.
Tawney observed almost a century ago.7 What is the proper study of a history of capitalism,
now? There are significant features of capitalist society most can probably agree on: wagerelations; the gearing of private property for profit-making; the coupling of ideas of progress
with the unceasing expansion of productive capital; and the contradictory promises for
infinite growth and social stability produced by enacting relentless competition in a finite
world. But capitalism is also an elusive, often polemical concept that arouses considerable
disagreement. The term is loaded differently in its various Marxian, Weberian and Polanyian
iterations, and with a tendency to imply teleology and determinism and its lack of agreed
precision, it is easily reduced to caricature.8 Capitalism has, then, always provoked contest
and suspicion. Until recently, many scholars had abandoned the concept altogether. From the
mid-twentieth century some intellectuals were already prophesising a post-capitalist or postindustrial society, before the shift in focus towards culture and linguistics across the social
sciences encouraged analyses of social fluidity and ‘fracture’ over structure and solidity.9
Likwise, by the 1990s, the prouncement of the ‘end of history’, and the responses it elicited
from postcolonial scholars, saw the analysis of capitalism transmute into analyses of multiple
or altnerative ‘modernities’.
10
6 Hannah Forsyth and Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Seeking a New Materialism in Australian History’, Australian
Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 169–88; Simon Ville and Claire Wright, ‘Neither a Discipline nor a Colony:
Renaissance and Re-Imagination in Economic History’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 152–68.
Several workshops have also recently explored these questions, including, Capitalism in Australia: New
Histories for a Reimagined Present (La Trobe University, November 2018) and History of Capitalism
Workshop: Methods, Sources, Politics (UTS, September 2019). For the revival of Australian economic history
generally, see, Ian McLean, Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2012); Simon Ville and Glenn Withers, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of
Australia (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
7 R.H. Tawney, History and Society: Essays by R.H. Tawney (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 194.
For a discussion of the history of the term, see Michael Merrill, ‘How Capitalism Got Its Name’, Dissent 61 no.
4 (2014): 87–92.
8 For a recent discussion of these iterations and their applications today, see, Geoff Ingham, Capitalism
(London: Polity, 2008).
9 Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2015); Daniel T. Rogers, The Age of Fracture (Harvard: Harvard University Press,
2012).
10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton Univesrity Press, 2000).
3
A similar trajectory can be traced in Australia. Historians have been writing histories
of Australian capitalism for almost a century. While never ascribed the same kind of elective
affinity associated with American capitalism, capitalist development has long been a central
trope in the writing of settler Australian history, serving as a template for radical nationalist,
the New Left and new social historians, as well the many Australian economic histories
penned after World War II.
12 Collectively, these lines of scholarship debated whether
capitalism was inherent to Australian settlement or the consequence of a ‘transition’ from the
penal to capitalist economy. Writing in the 1940s and advocating national independence from
Britain’s old imperial grasp, Brian Fitzpatrick argued that ‘English capital was the motive
power for what took place in Australia’, just as Philip McMichael, writing forty years later
with sensitivity to the impulses of globalisation, read Australian settlement as ‘an ingredient
in the emerging world-capitalist order’, finding the ‘immanence of capitalist social relations
within the original colonial military-bureaucratic state’.13 Alternatively, Noel Butlin,
witnessing a maturing national economy in the 1950s and 60s, argued in response to
Fitzpatrick that Australian history was more than a ‘footnote to the Industrial Revolution’, but
rather developed a distinct ‘brand of capitalism’, a ‘mixed economy system’ in which
Australian governments made crucial decisions about investments and development.14
Similarly, Butlin’s student, Andrew Wells, later described ‘the formation of a distinctive
Australian capitalism’, one that did not follow the paradigmatic shift from feudalism to
capitalism, but underwent an uneven and gradual ‘commodification of social relations’ by
displacing Indigenous peoples and actively combining unique geographical, demographic,
institutional and legal circumstances: ‘capitalism in Australia was the product of conscious
human activity’.15 By then, however, with the cultural turn of the 1980s, the usefulness of
capitalism as a framing device was increasingly restrained to works that drew explicitly on
Marxian, Gramscian or world-systems theory, or in the fruitful but brief flowering of ‘settler
12 For recent reappraisals of earlier studies in the historical political economy of Australia capitalism, see: Henry
Paternoster, Reimagining Class in Australia: Marxism, Populism and Social Science (Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017); Llewellyn Williams-Brooks, ‘Resisting Whig History: Putting the Australian New Left in
Perspective’, Labour History 114 (2018): 153–68.
13 Brian Fitzpatrick, The British Empire in Australia; an Economic History, 1834–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 1941), xiii; Philip McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarian Question: Foundations of Capitalism
in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1, 35–6.
14 Noel Butlin, Investment in Australian Economic Development, 1861–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1964), 5.
15 Andrew Wells, Constructing Capitalism: An Econrouomic History of Eastern Australia, 1788–1901 (Sydney:
Allen & Unwin, 1989), 1, 26.
4
capitalism’ studies.16 To be sure, Australian historians never abandoned ostensibly
‘economic’ subjects through this period as they engaged parthbreaking research on topics
such as work and the welfare-state, and often assumed capitalist relations as the backdrop
against which gendering, racialising and other semiotic systems were invented.
17 But as a
historical process to be explained, capitalism was abandoned as too totalising, too
determinist, too Euro-centric, and blind to gender, race and contignecy.
Given these legacies, it is not surprising that the recent revival of the study of
capitalism has been met with hesitation. Critics suspect its return risks a covert reinstatment
of methodological nationalism, that it dilutes the hard-won focus on gender and race,
inscribes capitalist relations with a hegemonic status that precludes imagining alternatives,
and privileges social criticism at the expense of rigorous analysis.18 In this last instance, there
are repeated demands to define what is meant by ‘capitalism’ in contemporary scholarship. Is
there an agreed target or boundary of inquiry? And yet, a conspicuous feature of the new
histories of capitalism has been to often resist definition.19 Similarly, none of the authors of
the articles here offer an explicit working definition of capitalism – save for Tim Rowe, in his
return to Marxian political economy. In some respects, the diverse historiographies and
methodologies drawn upon by new histories of capitalism make it impossible to find a settled
meaning. Instead, some historians, as we see here, are intrigued by bringing the economy
more generally back into a historiography that has focused on culture and society (as in Yves
16 McMichael; Wells; E. L. Wheelwright and K. D. Buckley, eds, Essays in the Political Economy of Australian
Capitalism, Five volumes (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Books, 1976); Alastair Davidson, The Invisible
State: The Formation of the Australian State (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Donald Denoon,
Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983); Peter Beilharz and Lloyd Cox, ‘Review Essay: Settler Capitalism Revisited’, Thesis Eleven 88, no.
1 ( 2007): 112–24; Christopher Lloyd, Jacob Metzer and Richard Sutch, eds., Settler Economies in World
History (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
17 In an important critique, Nan Enstad has highlighted that one of the chief and highly misleading ‘jeremaids’
exercised by those practising ‘new histories of American capitalism’ is that historians are now triumphantly
returning to histories of ‘the economy’ after three decades concerned with ‘social and cultural history’. Rather,
as the articles in this issue attest, much of what counts for ‘new’ histories of capitalism’ self-consciously builds
on insights garned by those writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Nan Enstad,‘The “Sonorous Summons” of the New
History of Capitalism, Or, What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Economy?’ Modern American
History 2 (2019): 83–95. For a critical examination of the claims that cultural historians abandoned economics,
see JamesW. Cook, “The Kids Are Alright: On the ‘Turning’ of Cultural History,” American Historical Review
117, no. 3 (2012): 746–71.
18 For prominent critiques of ‘new histories of American capitalism’, see Eric Hilt, ‘Economic History,
Historical Analysis, and the “New History of Capitalism”’, The Journal of Economic History 77, no. 2 (2017):
511–36; Amy Dru Stanley, ‘Histories of Capitalism and Sex Difference’, Journal of the Early Republic 36, no.2
(2016): 343–50; Paul Kramer, ‘Embedding Capital: Political-Economic History, The United States and the
World’, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (2016): 331–62.
19 See for example the discussion in Sven Beckert, Angus Burgin, Peter James Hudson, Louis Hyman, Naomi
Lamoreaux, Scott Marler, Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Philip Scranton and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, ‘Interchange:
The History of Capitalism’, The Journal of American History 101, no.2 (2014): 503–36.
5
Rees’ and Jack Fahey’s articles), or by the insertion of culture and society into the study of
the economic past (as Claire Wright does in her parsing of Australian corporate boards).
Across these examples, capitalism is now being invoked foremost as a ‘rallying cry’, to
borrow the American historian Julia Ott’s language, designating a place to begin ‘provocative
conversations’.20 Capitalism fits this purpose so well, Jürgen Kocka has noted, because it has
always been fundamentally ‘a concept of difference’, used either to help understand
something new and different about contemporary times, or as a critical device to help
imagine how things were or might yet be otherwise.21
Reclaiming capitalism on these terms has particular salience for contemporary
Australian historiography. At one level, the return to capitalism marks a revolution in the
academic cycle. As economic questions are married with the paradigms of cultural and
transnational historiography, the new histories of capitalism provide an important if belated
response to Ann Curthoys’ questioning of the future of Australian historiography in the face
of the field’s relative ‘isolation’.22 Of course, in the intervening two decades since this
problem was posed, political and even existential circumstances have injected Curthoys’
question with new meaning. Historians are now challenged to consider not the future of their
discipline, but the politics of the future itself. In these circumstances, re-engaging capitalism
provides a powerful lens through which historians might contribute to debates about
economic and environmental crises that have become ever-present. For example, while
Australia’s relatively calm weathering of the Great Recession was popularly interpreted by
some as ‘the Australian moment’ that vindicated the 1980s dismantling of protectionism and
reaffirmed an Australian exceptionalism, historians (only some invoking capitalism) have
reminded us of longer term trajectories and persistent and deep-seated inequalities of power
and wealth.23 In the face of complacent triumphalism, it is the task of critical scholarship to
continue raising questions about the public and global responsibilities of country as
prosperous as Australia. As Quinn Slobodian argues in his thought-provoking comment on
20 Ott in ‘Interchange’, 506.
21 Jürgen Kocka, ‘Introduction’, in Kocka and Linden, eds, Capitalism, 2–3.
22 Ann Curthoys, ‘Does Australian History Have a Future?’ Australian Historical Studies 33, no.18 (2002):
140–52.
23 George Megalogenis, The Australian Moment: How we were made for these times (Melbourne: Penguin
Books, 2016); William Coleman, ed., Only in Australia: The History, Politics, and Economics of Australian
Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); For opposing views, see Frank Bongiorno, The
Eighties (Melbourne: Black Inc. Books, 2016); Keith Dowding, ‘Australian Exceptionalism Reconsidered’,
Australian Journal of Political Science 52, no.2 (2017): 165–82; Stephen Bell and Michael Keating, Fair Share:
Competing Claims and Australia’s Economic Future (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018); Damien
Cahill and Philip Toner, eds, Wrong Way: How Privatisation and Economic Reform Backfired (Melbourne: La
Trobe University Press, 2018).
6
this special issue, a defensible history of capitalism is one that keeps a ‘keen eye on systems
of disempowerment and the thwarted possibility of alternate, unrealised futures’.
The five articles in this issue deploy capitalism to provoke different ways of thinking
about the political and cultural economy of Australian historical experience. The title of this
special issue is intended to suggest some of the parameters of such research. By inserting and
bracketing Australia in the title of our collection, we want to challenge what has often been
the distinctive but unremarked American flavour of new histories of capitalism, bringing
attention to historical generalisations based on the default use of American examples and
experiences, while also underlining that it is unrealistic to argue for an exceptional national
Australian experience of the capitalist past, or present. Instead, the field’s future lies in the
historical acknowledgement of structural similarities, networks of connection and
interdependencies of events and experiences that make each national history both specific and
entangled. Bracketing ‘(Australia)’ is our way of bringing attention to what we consider
important methodological points as this historiography deepens and expands. It registers our
suspension of assumptions about Australia’s historical capitalist ‘founding’ or ‘transition’.
24
Rather, the history of (Australian) capitalism is treated not as a pregiven object or social form
to be explained, but a lever with which to open up understudied relationships, processes,
knowledge and practices of Australian economic life.
While the articles in this issue are ‘new’ in their framing and intent, as their endnotes
indicate, all are deeply indebted to earlier historiographies just as they are engaged with
current international conversations. Likewise, they are concerned with the distinctive
dimensions of Australian capitalist experience: the imperial heritage; the growth of the firm
in organising economic relations; the Australian emphasis on bureaucracy and expertise; the
intersection between consumerism and national identity; and the legacies of settlerIndigenous relations.25 Each also yields new perspectives by asking fresh questions and
setting their topics in multiple regional, urban, national and transnational scales, so to
destabilise entrenched assumptions and binaries. Together, these articles announce not
another ‘turn’, but give focus to conversations that are already occurring among historians
who are reimaging Australia’s political-economic past as they engage debates about its
24 This remains a moot question in some quarters. See, Elizabeth Humphreys, ‘The birth of Australia: Noncapitalist social relations in a capitalist mode of production?’, Australian Journal of Political Economy 70
(2012): 110–29.
25 The distinctiveness of Australia settler capitalism has recently been restated in Simon Ville and David
Merrett, ‘Australia: Settler capitalism sans doctrines’ in The Routledge Companion to Business History, eds J.F.
Wilson, S. Toms, A. de Jong, and E. Buchnea (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), 159–72.
7
present and future. While much of this recent scholarship does not rely on ‘capitalism’,
‘materialism’ or ‘political economy’ as analytic devices, in the remainder of this introduction
we wish to register some connections between the articles in this issue and this broader
literature in order to propel a more unified and focused engagement with Australia’s capitalist
past, present and futures.
As Slobodian notes in his concluding comment, the articles offer ‘five entry points’
which give a renewed sense of capitalism as an object of study. Ben Huf begins by
considering the most obvious but least-studied personas of capitalist societies – the capitalist
– as a distinct colonial ‘type’. This focus enables him to re-read colonial history in terms of
an Anglo-imperial moment when the wealth-accumulating subject was achieving widespread
legitimation, highlighting the political and technological processes that habituated practices
of pecuniary valuation, investment and accumulation. How did these processes configure the
colonial world? Huf’s reappraisal of colonial capitalists follows other scholarship that is
reconsidering the kinds of actors – women businessowners, Indigenous peoples, convicts and
other coerced and unfree labourers – that populated nineteenth-century imperialist economic
expansion.26 More pointedly, by rethinking what capitalists do, Huf’s essay extends current
research on how the processes of Australian settlement involved transforming the material
and non-material world into investable, wealth-generating assets.27 Focusing on the capitalist
also encourages a remapping of colonial economic relations in terms of hierarchies of
monetised credit relations which linked frontier expansion with colonial merchants, imperial
bankers and City of London bill brokers. This approach connects with a growing body of
research emphasising the politics of financial and monetary systems that exercised imperial
and Australian capitalism.28 It also evokes the degrees to which capitalist relations overflow
26 For example, Cath Bishop, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (Sydney:
NewSouth, 2015); David Roberts, ‘The “Knotted Hands that Set Us High”: Labour History and the Study of
Convict Australia’, Labour History 100 (2011): 33–50; Julia Martinez, Claire Lowrie, Francis Steel and Victoria
Haskins, Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Claire
Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2016), Dianne Kirkby and Sophie Loy-Wilson, eds, ‘Special Issue: Labour History and the “Coolie Question”’,
Labour History 113 (2017); Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific
Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
27 For example, Julie McIntyre, ‘Adam Smith and Faith in the Transformative Qualities of Wine in Colonial
New South Wales’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no.2 (2011): 194–211; Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre, ‘John
Bull’s Other Vineyard: Selling Australian Wine in Nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 45, no.2 (2017): 259–83.
28 Michael Beggs, Inflation and the Making of Australian Monetary Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2015); Andrew Dilley, Finance, Politics and Imperialism: Australia, Canada and the City of London, c.1896–
1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillian, 2012); Bernard Attard and Andrew Dilley, ‘Finance empire and the British
World’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41, no.1 (2013): 1–10; Stephen Bell, Australia’s
Monetary Mandarins: The Reserve Bank and the Politics of Money (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
8
‘national’ borders, not only in the form of financial capital and tradable commodities, but also
in the transnational movement of people and ideas in ships, planes and telegraph wires.29
Moving into the twentieth century, Claire Wright’s study of interlocking directorates
in Australia on the eve of World War I provides a powerful example of how repurposed tools
can help illuminate new understandings of the patterns and distribution of wealth and power
in Australian history. In contrast to older accounts of the social laboratory and labour
movement that was ‘civilising capitalism’ in Deakinite Australia, Wright reviews the boards
of Australia’s largest 125 firms in the 1910s to provide evidence of the vast power wielded by
a relatively small and interconnected business elite who sat on multiple boards, intermarried,
shared close social connections and imperial cachet.30 By combining network analysis with
prosopography, Wright highlights the relational nature of political, social and business power.
Class, gender, sociability and empire were mutually constitutive of a new kind of capitalist
hierarchy and a homogenous, corporate elite in early twentieth-century Australia. This
multidimensional analysis of the ‘structure’ of economic power in Australian society
complements the emphasis Simon Ville and others have placed on the exchange of ‘social
capital’ in shaping business practices and relations in twentieth-century Australia.31 It also
speaks to Hannah Forsyth’s recent uses of census data, which has combined quantitative and
discursive analyses to recast our understanding of the historical development of the
professions and processes of professionalisation. Forsyth, like Wright, upends gendered
assumptions about employment relations and highlights the entanglement of moral and
29 David Thackery, Forging A British World of Trade: Culture, Ethnicity, and Market in the EmpireCommonwealth, 1880–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Felicity Barnes, ‘Lancashire’s “War”
with Australia: Rethinking Anglo-Australian Trade and the Cultural Economy of Empire, 1934–36’, The
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 46, no. 4 (2018): 707–30; Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson,
Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Stuart Ward,‘Sentiment and Self-Interest: The Imperial Ideal
in Anglo-Australian Commercial Culture’, Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 116 (2001):91–108; Sophie
Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in a Port Treaty City (London: Routledge,
2017); Frances Steel, Oceania Under Steam: Sea Transport and the Cultures of Colonialism (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2011); Simone M. Muller and Heidi J.S. Tworek, ‘“The Telegraph and the Bank”:
on the Interdependence of Global Communications and Capitalism, 1866–1914’, Journal of Global History 10,
no. 2 (2015): 259–83.
30 Cf: Bede Nairn, Civilising Capitalism: The Labour Movement in New South Wales (Canberra: Australian
National University Press, 1973); Marian Sawer, The Ethical State: Social Liberalism in Australia (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Publishing, 2003).
31 Simon Ville, ‘Social Capital Formation in Australian Rural Communities: The Role of the Stock and Station
Agent’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36, no. 2 (2005): 185–208; Simon Ville and Claire Wright, ‘Buzz
and Pipelines: Knowledge and Decision-Making in a Global Services Precinct’, Journal of Urban History 45,
no. 2 (2019): 191-210; Claire Wright, Simon Ville and David Merrett, ‘Quotidian Routines: The Cooperative
Practices of a Business Elite’, Enterprise and Society (2019): doi:10.1017/eso.2018.103.
9
material cultures in Australia’s shifting class relations.32 In highlighting the relational power
of Australia’s corporate elite – and its economic, political and cultural manifestations –
Wright also brings to the fore recent research into other kinds of powerful relationships and
cliques in corporate Australia, which, as she notes, can be both constructive and menacing.33
The articles by Yves Rees and Jack Fahey are concerned less with conceptualising the
structures of Australia’s political and cultural economy than with dissecting its constitutive
discourses. Rees charts a remarkable effort in self-redescription by Australian economists
who transformed the status and reputation of their discipline from a shorthand for ‘leftist and
socialist provocation’ in the early twentieth century, into a field of disinterested expertise
considered essential to the tasks of modern government and bureaucracy. Like Wright,
professionalisation is clearly a central theme in Rees’ account, with its focus on D.B.
Copland’s education, rhetoric, institution-building and connections with business. The deeper
achievement Rees uncovers, however, is the success of Australian economists in becoming
purveyors of objective, positivist knowledge about the market economy. This veneer
concealed, Rees argues, the complicity of neoclassical economists in naturalising the market
order. Rees is contributing to a critical reappraisal of the status and authority of professional
economists and neoclassical economics that has occupied scholars worldwide in the decade
since the Great Recession.34 They also extend recent local work on the role of professional
and bureaucratic ‘expertise’ – accountants, actuaries, insurers, stockbrokers and bankers – in
shaping twentieth century Australian and international governance.35 Economics was just one
32 Hannah Forsyth, ‘Class, Professional Work, and the History of Capitalism in Broken Hill, c. 1880–1910’,
Labor 15, no.2 (2018): 21–47; Hannah Forsyth, ‘Reconsidering Women’s Role in the Professionalisation of the
Economy: Evidence from the Australian Census 1881–1947’, Australian Economic History Review 59, no.1
(2019): 55–79. See also, Georgina Murray, Capitalist Networks and Social Power in Australia and New Zealand
(London: Routledge, 2006).
33 Michael Roddan, The People Vs The Banks (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019); Simon Ville and
David Merrett, ‘Too Big to Fail:Explaining the Timing and Nature of Intervention in the Australian Wool
Market, 1916–1991’, Australian Journal of Politics & History 62, no.3 (2016): 337–52; Ian D. Gow and Stuart
Kells, The Big Four: The Curious Past and Perilous Future of the Global Accounting Monopoly (Melbourne:
Blank Inc., 2018); David Merrett, ‘The Making of Australia’s Supermarket Duopoly, 1958–2000’, Australian
Economic History Review (2019):https://doi-org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1111/aehr.12172; John
Woodland, Money Pits: British Mining Companies in the Californian and Australian Gold Rushes of the 1850s
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Brandon Ellem, The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come (Perth: UWA
Publishing, 2017); Jacqui Donegan, ‘The Confectionary Kings: Robertson, Allen and Hoadley, 1875–1945’
(PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2015).
34 Marion Fourcade, Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain and
France, 1890s to 1990s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
35 Kate Darian Smith and James Waghorn, eds, The First World War, the Universities and the Professions in
Australia 1914–39 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019); Richard Brooks, Bean Counters: The
Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism (London: Atlantic Books, 2018); Robert Crawford
and Jackie Dickenson, Behind Glass Doors: The World of Australian Advertising, 1959-1989 (Perth: UWA
Publishing, 2016).
10
profession among many to achieve recognised expert status after World War I. Rees provides
the crucial backstory of how economists came to be specially empowered, attaining the normshaping role they have exercised without peer since the postwar reconstruction.36 Recent
studies of the intersecting role of economists, bureaucrats, business and labour movement
elites in restructuring the Australian economy under the Australian Labor Party government
in the 1980s gives added salience to Rees’ origin story of economists’ political savvy. Such
lineages beckon a deeper historicising of continuities and breaks in Australian economic and
political orthodoxy.37
Importantly, Rees demonstrates the significance of Australian economists looking to
their United States counterparts for inspiration and legitimation in the 1920s. If twentiethcentury Australia came to be made in the image of its economists, and its economists looked
to America, then new histories of capitalism reveal a very different kind of Australian
national-identity making to the familiar empire-to-nation story associated with post-WWII
Australia.38 This transnational American-Australian setting is a central theme of Jack Fahey’s
article, which turns our attention from economics to the introduction of American-style
public relations into Australian business and culture in the interwar years. Fahey recounts the
fascinating process by which the American firm, General Motors Holden (GMH), newly
established in Australia, cultivated a distinct Australian identity by linking the manufacturing,
purchasing and driving of Holden cars with narratives of Australian nation-building. By
historicising the entanglement of consumption, nation and modernity in GMH public
relations’ messaging and belief systems, Fahey goes some way to exposing the power of
representation inherent in twentieth-century Australian capitalism. His work connects with
recent research on Australian cultures of consumerism that have been traced varyingly into
suburbia, shopping centres, sports and the corporate-theology of Anzac, as well as work on
36 Carolyn Holbrook, ‘The Collaboration of Intellectuals and Politicians in the Postwar Reconstruction: A
Reassessment’, Australian Historical Studies 47, no. 2 (2016); Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest
Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015); Sam Furphy, ed., The Seven
Dwarfs and the Age of the Mandarins: Australian Government Administration in the Post-War
Reconstruction Era (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015); Alex Millmow, The Power of Economic Ideas: The Origins
of Keyensianism MacroeconomicsManagement in Interwar Australia, 1929–1939 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2010);
Selwyn Cornish and William Coleman, Giblin’s Platoon: The Trials and Triumph of the Economist in
Australian Public Life (Canberra: ANU Press, 2006).
37 Elizabeth Humphreys, How Labor Built Neoliberalism (Lieden: Brill, 2018). Cf: Beggs, Inflation; Nicholas
Brown, “‘A Sense of Number and Reality”: Economics and Government in Australia, 1920–1950’, Economy
and Society 26, no. 2 (1997): 233–56.
38 Cf: James Curran and Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire (Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press, 2010).
11
anti-consumerist counter-movements in Australian history.39 In contrast to Wright’s
suggestion of the relational power between corporate firms, Fahey’s emphasis is on the
cultural power exerted by a single firm – GMH. This perspective extends historians’ recent
interest in the ways corporate cultures have shaped and encroached upon aspects of Australia
life, including in the regional development of mining towns and the gendered codifications of
business fashions.40 Finally, in contrast to triumphant stories of 1980s ‘deregulation’ and
market liberalisation, in demonstrating these links with American investment, advertising and
consumerism, Fahey’s work also connects recent scholarship on Australia’s longstanding
embroilment in various forms of globalisation, not only in trade and foreign investment, but
aid, education, publishing and popular culture.41
Fahey’s article alerts us to some of the processes by which consumerism and
corporatisation came to redefine aspects of Australia economic and cultural life across the
twentieth century. Conversely, Tim Rowse reminds us that in the settler context, these
39 Jo Hawkins, ‘Anzac for Sale: Consumer Culture, Regulation and the Shaping of a Legend, 1915–21’,
Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2015): 7–26; Joan Beaumont, ‘Commemoration in Australia: A Memory
Orgy?’, Australian Journal of Political Science 50, no.3 (2015): 536–44; Kirra Minton, ‘How to be a Girl:
Consumerism Meets Guidance in the Australian Women’s Weekly’s Teen Segments, 1952–1959’, Journal of
Australian Studies 41, no. 1 (2017): 3–17; Murray G. Phillips, ‘From Suburban Football to International
spectacle: The Commodification of Rugby League in Australia, 1907–1995’, Australian Historical Studies 29,
no.110 (1998): 27–48; Matthew Bailey, ‘Urban disruption, suburbanization and retail innovation: establishing
shopping centres in Australia’, Urban History (2019): doi:10.1017/S09639268190000178; Renate Howe, David
Nichols and Graeme Davison, Trendyville: The Battle for Australia’s Inner Cities (Melbourne: Monash
University Publishing, 2014); Graeme Davison, City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia (Sydney:
New South, 2016); Amanda McLeod, ‘Self-sufficiency in a “time of plenty”: mass consumerism and freedom in
1970s Australia’, History Australia 14, no. 3 (2017): 395–413; Jon Piccini, Transnational Protest, Australian
and the 1960s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Kate Murphy, ‘“In the Backblocks of Capitalism”:
Australian Student Activism in the Global 1960s’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no.2 (2012): 252–68; Tony
Moore, Dancing with Empty Pockets: Australia’s Bohemians (Sydney: Pier 9, 2012).
40 Thomas C. Buchanan and Thomas A. Mackay ‘B.H.P.’s “Place in the Industrial Sun”: Whyalla in its Golden
Age’, Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 1 (2018): 85–100; Thomas C. Buchanan and Thomas A. Mackay,
(2018)‘The return of the steel octopus: free enterprise and Australian culture during BHP’s Cold War’, History
Australia 15, no. 1 (2018):62–77; Melissa Bellanta, ‘Business Fashion: Masculinity, Class and Dress in 1870s
Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 189–212. For a case study of labour and business
entanglements created by the investments of the Swiss mining company Alusuisse in Australia around 1970, see
Leo Grob, ‘Manageriale Macht und die Mikropolitik der Raumordnung. Streikprävention und Städtebau bei
Alusuisse in Australien um 1970’, (‘Managerial power and the micropolitcs of space. The prevention of strikes
and urban development by Alusuisse in Australia around 1970’), Traverse, Zeitschrift für Geschichte (2019/3,
forthcoming). We thank Pierre Eichenberger for this reference.
41 Agnieszka Sobocinska, ‘How to Win Friends and Influence Nations: The International History of
Development Volunteering’, Journal of Global History (2017): 49–74; Shanthi Robertson, Transnational
Student-migrations and the State: the Education-migration Nexus (Basingston: Palgrave Macmilllan, 2013);
David Lowe, ‘Australia’s Colomno Plans, Old and New: International Students as Foreign Relations’,
International Journal of Culutral Policy 21, no.4 (2015): 448–62; David Carter and Roger Osborne, Australian
Books and Authors in the American Marketplace (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2018); Victoria Kuttainen,
Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the
Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2018); Jill Julius Matthews,
Dance Hall & Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press 2005); Desley
Deacon, ‘Location! Location! Location! Mind Maps and Theatrical Circuits in Australian Transnational
History’, History Australia 5, no. 3 (2008): 81.1–81.16.
12
impulses were never totalising. By offering a reading of the settler state’s transition from
assimilation to self-determination policies through the lens of the 1970–72 Gibbs Committee
on the future of Aboriginal communities on pastoral properties in the Northern Territory,
Rowse demonstrates that the policies and institutions of the settler state have long harboured
both capitalist and custodial imperatives. As self-determination came to dissolve an older
‘feudal’ pastoralist order (a term used by mid-century contemporaries and historians since) it
helped preserve Indigenous custodial order in the Northern Territory. Rowse shows that the
settler state was faced with balancing its aims of empowering Indigenous peoples as liberal
citizen-wage earners and assisting communities in managing country accordingly to evolving
customary law. Rowse’s observations follow a rich vein of scholarship that no longer regards
Indigenous engagement with settler capitalism as an either/or dilemma of Indigenous
elimination or resistance. Instead, it appears that complex hybrid economies mediated
between Indigenous traditions and practices and settler capitalist accumulation, as played out
on cattle stations, in owning pubs and new forms of Indigenous entrepreneurship.42
Part of the achievement of this scholarship is to call into question what is sometimes
represented as the obdurate, hegemonic and insurmountable structure of capitalism. As
Australian feminist geographers, led by J.K. Gibson-Graham, have been arguing for some
time, such representations can obscure the reality that non-capitalist forms have always
coexisted alongside capitalist processes.43 The relations between settlers and Indigenous
peoples is only one way of highlighting these hybrid or diverse economies. Others include the
household, community, voluntary groups and, as Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave have
recently emphasised, cooperatives.44 Gibson-Graham would no doubt characterise Rowse’s
Marxist theorisation of non-capitalist relations in northern Australian as ‘capital-centric’, but
42 Jason Mika, Lorraine Warren, Dennis Floey and Farah Palmer, ‘Perspectives on indigenous entrepreneurship,
innovation and enterprise’, Journal of Management and Organisation 23, no.6 (2017): 767–73; Nicholas Biddle
and Jon Altman, ‘Refiguring Indigenous economies: a 21st-century perspective’ in Cambridge Economic
History of Australia, eds Ville and Withers, 530–54; Charlie Ward, A Handful of Sand: the Gurindji Struggle,
After the Walk-off (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2016); Alexis Wright, Tracker: Stories of Tracker
Tilmouth (Artarmon: Giramondo, 2017) Maggie Brady, Teaching ‘Proper’ Drinking?: Clubs and Pubs in
Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2017); Shannyn Palmer, ‘(un)making Angas Downs: a spatial
history of a Central Australian pastoral station, 1930–1980’ (PhD thesis Australian National University, 2017);
Hannah Forsyth and Altin Gavanvic, ‘The Logic of Survival: Towards an Indigenous-centred History of
Capitalism in Wilcannia’, Settler Colonial Studies 8, no.4 (2018): 464–88; Zoe Laidlaw and Alan Lester, eds,
Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World
(Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Giordano Nanni, The Colonization of Time: Ritual, Routine and
Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University, 2012)
43 J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Know It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
44 Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave, A Global History of Co-operative Business (London: Routledge, 2018);
‘The Labour Movement and Cooperatives’, Labour History 112 (May 2017).
13
such critique only reinforces the point that there are multiple and sometimes incongruous
ways of historicising capitalism and its absence. In this regard, Rowse’s approach provides
tools for extending his recent suggestion of an analytic division between northern and
southern Australia, building upon earlier attempts by political economists and geographers to
grasp Australian processes of ‘internal colonisation’.45 Just as settler-Indigenous relations
need to be analysed with different tools and frameworks in each axis, so the processes of
Australian settler capitalism requires finer theorisation in different parts of the continent. As
has been argued in recent critiques of the recurring proposals to develop ‘the empty North’,
Australian capitalism, like settler colonialism, remains a heterogenous, ‘incomplete’
project.46
In what directions can this new history of capitalism go? The emphasis in this issue is
on capitalisation and credit-money hierarchies, structures of corporate power, the normcreating power of economics and public relations, and the economic pluralities of settler
societies. The silences here are new Australian environmental histories, many of which now
take capitalistic processes as their starting point.47 Such work also includes recent studies into
the entangled histories of businesspeople and international environmental governance, the
longstanding relations between the coal indutry and Australian governments, and new studies
on climate politics.48 There is a strong congruence between new histories of capitalism and
environmental history: where the impulse of the former is to denaturalise binaries between
state and market, so the latter is concerned with historicsing the relationship between culture
and nature. The next step is to ask how these two projects can be brought into closer
dialogue. Despite professed mutual interest, the gulf between them remains significant. It is
notable, for example, that recent Australian Historical Association conferences have run
45 Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous Heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies 45, no.3 (2014): 297–310; David
Drakakis- Smith, ‘Internal Colonialism and the Geographical Transfer of Value : an Analysis of Aboriginal
Australia’, in Uneven Development and the Geographical Transfer of Value, eds D.K. Forbes and P.J. Rimmer
(Canberra: Australian National University, 1984), 153–71.
46 Sarah Irving, ‘Governing Nature: The Problem of North Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 45, no. 3
(2014): 388–406; Russell McGregor, Environment, Race and Nationhood in Australia: Revisiting the Empty
North (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
47 Tom Griffiths, ‘Environmental History, Australian Style’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2015):
157–73; Libby Robin, ‘Histories for Changing Times: Entering the Anthropocence’, Australian Historical
Studies 44, no.3 (2013): 239–340; Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An
Environmental History (London: Routledge, 2014); Ruth Morgan, Running Out: Water in Western Australia
(Perth: UWA Publishing, 2015); Katerina Teaiwa, ‘Ruining Pacific Islands’, Australian Historical Studies 46,
no. 3 (2015): 374–91.
48 Glenda Sluga, ‘Capitalists and Climate’, Humanity Journal (2017): humanityjournal.org/blog/capitalists-andclimate/; Hans Baer, ‘The Nexus of the Coal Industry and the State in Australia: Historical Dimensions and
Contemporary Challenges’, Energy Policy 99 (2016): 194–202; Rebecca Pearse, Pricing Carbon in Australia:
Contestation, The State and Market Failure (London: Routledge, 2017).
14
separate environmental and economic streams over the past few years.49 But are they really
dealing with distinct questions and phenomena? Moreover, the two historical forces which
today motivate these respective camps – human-induced climate change and forty years of
neoliberal globalisation – are culminating in a geopolitical crisis in the mass migration of
displaced peoples. As such, yet a third group of Australian scholars advocating a renewal in
migration studies – and which also had a distinct stream at AHA2019 – might also be brought
into productive dialogue with new histories of capitalism. The challenge, then, is clearly to
rework of our epistemic frameworks. Our times demand nothing less.
Ben Huf
University of Sydney
Email: ben.huf@sydney.edu.au
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002--0472-4933
Glenda Sluga
University of Sydney
Email: glenda.sluga@sydney.edu.au
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2481-3394
49 For some attempts, see, Janis Bailey and Ross Gwyther, ‘Red and Green: Towards a Cross-Fertilisation of
Labour and Environmental History’, Labour History 99 (2010): 1–16; Josh Spect, Red Meat Republic: A Hoofto Table History of How Beef Changed America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).
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