Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

This article examines interrelationships between industrial, urban and social change in a post-WW2 outer Melbourne industrial district. Using a range of data and disciplinary perspectives, we identify the factors that attracted Bosch Australia and other manufacturing firms to Clayton, now a major innovation district that is home to Monash University. Mapping the development of the Bosch Clayton plant and its links with the broader development of the district, we show how the built and social fabric that evolved to support innovators provides both assets and obstacles to post-industrial renewal.

This special issue contains five articles that focus on Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide to examine the transformative role of manufacturing in the evolution of the Australian city. While the Australian economy has never been highly industrialised, as manufacturing grew, peaking in importance at the end of the post-World War II boom, its influence on the spatial structure of the nation's major cities was profound. This article provides an overview of the rise of Australian manufacturing after World War I, the post-industrial contraction of the sector, and the effects of industrialisation on the spatial structure of cities, both in Australia and overseas.

In the late 19th century, new retail forms emerged in Australian cities and spread to regional towns. The department store, the mail order house, and the chain store were all identified by Schumpeter as examples of ‘the competition that matters’ in the retail trade. Their emergence was intimately tied to industrialisation: mass production and mass distribution co-evolved to produce the mass market. This article uses Sydney as a case study to explore the relational dynamic between shops and factories, the role of creative destruction in the evolution of Australia's retail trade, and the spatial morphology of these changes.

This article examines the economic, social, and morphological changes associated with the arrival, consolidation, and expansion of two major manufacturing complexes in inner Melbourne from the 1880s to the 1930s. Archival and primary sources that generate spatial data are used to consider workplace issues and the urban environmental impacts of industrialisation. We argue that while in keeping with new historiographies that emphasise global processes, historians must remain attuned to the localised impacts of economic change for people living in neighbourhoods that undergo such transformations.

In the 20th century, there was a worldwide trend for manufacturing jobs to grow faster in outer urban areas than in old city centres. Technological change—railways, electricity, and the internal combustion engine—permitted the development of new industries and larger, integrated mass production sites, but did not in itself cause these differences in urban spatial structure. Instead, using case studies of two Melbourne industrial clusters from the pre- and post-WW2 eras, we argue that industrial entrepreneurs shaped the built environment by investing in workplaces, housing, and infrastructure.

Philips Australia established its manufacturing branch in Adelaide in 1946. At its peak, the Hendon plant had 3500 employees and was one of many manufacturers that reshaped the city's north-western suburbs. Philips was enticed by the offer of relocation subsidies, access to Commonwealth buildings, and State provision of affordable housing. The company's approach to employee welfare included providing staff training and sporting and cultural amenities. The social impact of industrialisation and Philips' presence lasted several decades but faded after the company left in 1980 and immigrant workers aged. It did, however, contribute to permanent social changes in Adelaide's north-western suburbs.

Recent quantitative studies find steep reductions in Chinese per capita real GDP during 1700–1850, challenging long-standing views of eighteenth-century prosperity. While evidence surrounding likely consequences of deteriorating food availability remains inconclusive, examination of the grain output series proposed by Broadberry, Guan and Li reveals unrealistically tight error margins as a key driver of their results for the largest component of Qing-era GDP. Plausible revisions demonstrate that the underlying data easily accommodate stable or rising, as well as falling per capita grain supply, invalidating revisionist conclusions about GDP trends, Qing economic decline and the timing and extent of the Great Divergence.

Between 1898 and 1900, six British colonies held referendums on whether or not to join together as states in a federal Australia. We focus on New South Wales, which was pivotal to the affirmative result. We associate the share of ‘yes’ votes at the polling booth level with a range of county-level characteristics. We find no evidence that manufacturing districts favoured federation in the expectation of a higher tariff, and those born in the colony tended to vote against it. Voters close to land borders and further from Sydney strongly favoured federation but this support was undermined by low turnout.

The transition from sail to steam for emigrant ships on the route to Australia took place in the early 1880s. From the 1850s, a string of steamship ventures failed, but with one outstanding exception. Brunel's iconic ship the SS Great Britain made 32 voyages to Australia from 1852 to 1875 with a total of nearly 16,000 passengers. Among the key reasons for the Great Britain's success are the characteristics of the ship and the way it was adapted for the long voyage to the antipodes. Also important was the shrewd management of its owners, and an element of luck.

Following the establishment of the Treaty Port system, trade in imported cotton products—including manufactured cloth, finer yarn, and long-staple cotton—between the west and China began, though it expanded far less than Western manufacturers had anticipated. Nonetheless, the influx of manufactured cloth introduced substantial changes to China's cotton industry. In particular, the creation of new markets by Japanese companies and practices like direct purchasing significantly contributed to the advancement of the Chinese cotton textile industry. Consequently, over the course of roughly a century since the initial inflow of manufactured cloth, the cotton industry in China became increasingly globalised.