Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

This article considers hotel licensing and gender across New Zealand, New South Wales and Victoria in the long nineteenth century, creating timelines of legislative changes and exploring the impact of business regulation and its implementation on women. It exposes a disconnect between law and licensing court practices, indicative of the ways entrenched understandings of gendered behaviours and local conditions affected women in business. It demonstrates that women's rights as publicans went backwards in New Zealand and New South Wales, just as other rights were expanding. It explores Victorian exceptionalism, Victoria legalising female licensees when others did not.

This special issue examines women and Australian business history. Contributions explore women's entrepreneurship in small urban businesses, side hustles, agriculture, and family companies. Articles highlight the importance of women's businesses, as a financial necessity for women, their families, and their communities. Authors examine the barriers for women in business, including legislation, licensing, societal expectations, and discrimination. Articles also explore women's intersections with other demographic characteristics, with access to enterprise mediated by class and the rural–urban divide. Finally, contributions examine the way traditional archives have obscured histories of businesswomen, and the opportunities offered by feminist historical methodologies for studying business history.

This article examines gendered succession of Australia's large family companies between 1910 and 2018. It finds that female family members were not prepared to succeed, and their role in family companies was restricted by expectations of gender and class, and ideals of male lineage. As such, women were expected to perform social, domestic and philanthropic labour in service of the company, but were consistently overlooked for succession. This highlights the way family companies conferred both wealth and inequality to women, as well as the intersection between gendered succession decisions and the structures of Australian society.

In the last 15 years, mainstream use of the term ‘side hustle’ has boomed. But the act of having a side hustle is not new; the term's novelty obscures a long-established pattern of ‘sideline earning’ by Australian rural women, and indeed around the world. Through the lens of environmental, labour and gender history, and using interviews, digital media, diaries, court records, newspaper and magazine articles and other archival records, this research explores how Australian rural women have engaged in and relied on the practice of sideline earning as an economic necessity, long before it entered the mainstream economy and consciousness.

In the early 2000s international business scholar Ann Matasar declared of the rapidly globalising grape wine sector that no other industry had ‘so resolutely excluded women from positions of influence for so long.’ Following Florine Livat and Clara Jaffré that women on the supply side of wine remain understudied, this article draws upon a large-scale oral history project (Treading Out the Vintage 2000–2003) to make visible women as industry decision-makers between the 1960s and 1990s. This qualitative data set nuances Matasar's findings about the relatively limited opportunities for women to exert industry influence in a historically male domain. With family farming as the main entry point to the Australian industry, few women became decision-makers in this era, compared with women in urban sectors of the economy that benefited from gains in gender equality. Women who attained industry influence demonstrated enthusiasm and resilience while experiencing sexism and, often, balancing reproductive and domestic labour with agricultural business.

Little is known about the history of female investing in Australia. We develop a new dataset of company shareholders between 1857 and 1937, covering all major sectors of the economy. We calculate the female fraction of shareowners, their occupational and geographic backgrounds, and we analyse their investment patterns and behaviours including their risk profiles and portfolio construction decisions. Our findings suggest that ‘gender equity’—and more—had been reached, for some companies, by the interwar period. Women investors came from many walks of life, had various motives, and appear to have largely acted independently of other women and of men.

This article examines the rise and fall of the department of economic history at Monash University, between 1967 and 1993, through the prism of the careers of academics John McCarty and Angus Sinclair. The Monash staff personnel files reveal the importance of a small number of influential ‘God Professors’ in the initial appointment, and in the eventual loss of the department in the face of expanding business education.

In 1901 the British Parliament approved the Federation of its Australian Colonies to create the Commonwealth of Australia as a Dominion within the British Empire, ending half a century of border difficulties at a time when a developing settler community was establishing its economic viability. This research examines how the Murray River between Albury in the colony of New South Wales (NSW), and Echuca in Victoria (known as ‘the Upper Murray’), took on dual but contradictory roles. In the absence of developed land transport systems, rivers became avenues of access for the settlement and exploitation of hinterland regions. The Murray River developed as an invaluable transport link between a part of inland Australia and world markets. But it also acted as a physical and political divide between adjacent colonies, following the establishment of South Australia in 1836, and separation of the Port Phillip District from NSW to form the colony of Victoria in 1850. The development of the paddle steamer trade was essential to the Murray River's role as a transport link. The operation of commercial paddle steamers on the Upper Murray lasted only a few decades, but it provided vital trade, communications, and transport links during a period marked by Britain's industrial revolution (which demanded more raw wool), and the dramatic population inflow resulting from gold discoveries in Australia. This thesis contends that the Upper Murray and Riverina communities were influenced by, and reacted to, the development of steam navigation and to the decisions of the Imperial Parliament that made the river a colonial, or quasi-national border, allowing the individual colonial governments to make decisions in their own perceived best interests. The steam trade also fostered problems and movements for separation, annexation, and federation.

Human activity occurs within the bounds of unique bio-physical environments and can be influenced by those environments through direct exploitation or modification to make them more amenable to intended human activity. Just as the Indigenous people have significant belonging to, and influence over the environment, so European and other new settlers influenced the environment and become part of it. Early European settlers saw the Murray River system as valuable but difficult resource to exploit. By the time steamer traffic began on the river, for example, the difficulties posed by fallen trees were well known. Clearing the river for navigation was envisioned as enhancing access to wider markets, but the perceived benefits of a navigable river differed between the colonies. Governments were pressured to help overcome some of the problems the river posed to navigation, leading to discussion, and sometimes disagreement, between the colonial governments on strategies to realise this perceived potential.

Victoria, NSW, and South Australia were colonies within the British Empire and as such were subject to no over-riding loca