The genesis of this book lies with the observation that the recently published Cambridge History of Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (2013), allocated only a modest amount of attention to economic history. Moreover, it has been more than a quarter of a century since the last attempt at an overview on this theme was published, namely, The Australian Economy in the Long Run, edited by Rodney Maddock and Ian W. McLean (1987). As the Introduction and the first chapter of the book under review make clear, economic history departments have all but disappeared from Australian universities, although the discipline continues to flourish at the level of conferences and journals. The Australian approach now “sits somewhere between North American emphasis on applied economics and econometrics and the European tradition of narrative history” (p. 3). Thus the North American reader may find this volume more accessible than its title would indicate. Recent years have seen the publication of two other books on Australian economic history: Ian W. McLean, Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Economic Sources of Economic Growth (2013) and the second edition of Barrie Dyster and David Meredith, Australia in the Global Economy: Continuity and Change (2012). The current volume provides a broader and more detailed account, which will hopefully stimulate debate on the subject both within and beyond the academic community.
The book's thirty contributors are drawn principally from the ranks of economists and economic historians but with a sprinkling of people from the government and corporate sectors. Two workshops were held to coordinate the project. The editors chose an approach that combined the chronological and thematic. The disadvantage of this arrangement is a high level of repetition and the occasional omission of relevant background information; for example, it should have been mentioned far earlier that New South Wales originally referred to the entire colony, not just the current Australian state of that name. The main advantage of the approach is that it permits the same material to be addressed from different perspectives, enabling readers to focus on their area of interest.
The book is divided into six sections. The first has two chapters on the varying approaches and debates in the discipline followed by a brief review of economic growth since European settlement. Next, two chapters discuss the Aboriginal and convict legacies. It is a great strength of this volume that it has integrated the indigenous people into Australia's economic history. Information on the history of Australia before European settlement has been understandably difficult to come by, but considerable progress has been made in recent years. Two points of particular interest are the trade in the Chinese delicacy trepang (sea slugs) between northern Aboriginals and Macassans and the widespread use of burning to provide pasture and facilitate hunting. This land management practice caused the first Europeans to compare the landscape to an aristocratic park. Aborigines receive some attention throughout the book, and the final chapter discusses the contentious matter of their economic future.
Australia's foundation as a penal colony had one striking consequence: men far outnumbered women for a long time. Whether this was a good or bad thing was a matter of perspective, doubtless at the time as well as now. The contributors differ concerning the economic implications: on the one hand, a shortage of labor due to a low rate of reproduction; on the other, a workforce of young, healthy males, unencumbered by dependents (pp. 180, 115–16). The editors decided not to allocate a separate chapter to women, so they are treated variably by the different contributors.
The rest of the book traces particular themes through Australia's two hundred years of European settlement, with a general drift towards more recent times as the book progresses. Subjects covered include technology, labor, urbanization, infrastructure, business, manufacturing, capital markets, the service economy, trade, migration, welfare, and the role of government. It is arguably a consequence of the government-sponsored foundation of the colony that Australians expect the government to play an active role in regulating the economy. Wool was Australia's first major export—indeed, almost its only export until the discovery of gold, although there was a trade in horses with India that is not mentioned here. The historical reliance on resource extraction—pastoral, agricultural, and mineral—gave Australia the highest per capita income in the world during the mid-nineteenth century but arguably came at the expense of greater development of the manufacturing sector. It also had environmental consequences, which are discussed in a chapter on their relationship with property-rights regimes.
In the chapter “Colonial Enterprise,” the reference to the formation of British banks in Australia in the 1830s gives the impression that there had been no bank in the colony, completely ignoring the foundation of the Bank of New South Wales in 1817 (p. 206). Similarly, the listing of banking histories in “Capital Markets” fails to distinguish between the Bank of New South Wales and its successor, Westpac, and ignores the most recent history of that bank, by L. Sharon Davidson and Stephen Salsbury (Australia's First Bank: Fifty Years from the Wales to the Westpac [2005]) as it ignores R. J. Wood's The Commercial Bank of Australia Limited (1990) (p. 268). There seems little point in such a list if it is neither comprehensive nor up-to-date.
As one would expect, the book is filled with graphs, tables, and figures, supplemented by a statistical appendix of selected data covering the period from 1800 to 2010. While business history is not its main focus, the work is of undeniable relevance in providing an essential context as well as an important resource for comparative analysis. I expect it will provoke lively and productive debate for some time to come.
