Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

Long neglected within Eurocentric histories of Australian agriculture, a clearer view of Chinese market gardening in Australia has been emerging over recent decades. As a contribution to this ongoing work, this paper explores Chinese market gardens in Wollongong (known as Dark Dragon Ridge in Chinese), 70 km south of Sydney, between 1876 and 1930. Using a microhistorical framework with an emphasis on business and labour, and guided chiefly by gardeners' own accounts of their activities, I offer new insights into Chinese market gardening. This approach can, I conclude, markedly enhance understanding of this aspect of Australia's past.

Compiling data from dozens of archival sources, I assemble the most extensive series to date of the long-run imprisonment rate for five English-speaking nations: Australia, Canada, England and Wales, New Zealand, and the United States. These series are constructed as a share of adults rather than the entire population, and I discuss why the latter can be misleading. In the late-nineteenth century, Australia had the highest incarceration rate of these nations. Today, the United States has the highest rate. With the exception of Canada, incarceration rates have risen markedly since the mid-1980s. These new series are made available in full, to allow other researchers to explore the consequences and causes of incarceration.

What drove the precocious industrialisation in Britain was not demand for machines but rather (as Joel Mokyr and his co-authors have argued) the supply of useful knowledge and the skills needed to put it into practice. They were the force behind early innovation. But they did not act alone. They were reinforced by British institutions, which gave the British economy a century's head start over the rest of Europe and likely too over the rich parts of Asia. The institutions included a uniform fiscal and legal system; an effective means of training apprentices, who had escaped from local guild control; and a parliament that could raise taxes and exercise eminent domain but was at the same time a credible protector of private property. Among other things, these institutions facilitated the transportation of goods such as coal and they were backed up by policies that worked in favour of manufacturing. Together, the institutions and policies generated agglomeration effects that encouraged innovation. The agglomeration effects were more pronounced in western Europe than anywhere else in Eurasia and more developed in Britain than anywhere else.

Osamu Saito's pioneering research into the long-term changes in occupational structure of Japan has inspired scholars to take a fresh look at structural change in other countries. This article offers a case study of Indonesia. We find a rather slow pace of structural transformation until the 1970s – the immediate post-war period even saw a reversal of trends. After 1970, during a growth spurt, employment growth in manufacturing was not impressive, and services were an even more important source of employment. The role played by by-employment is also analysed, demonstrating that in 1905 the economy was quite diversified.

During their occupation of Sri Lanka (1640–1796) and following Sinhalese and Portuguese practices, the Dutch created an elaborate registration of people, estates, and labour services. The administrative records known as the thombos are incomparable in their level of detail, yet they have hardly been used for the purposes of demographic or economic history. This article describes the challenges involved in ‘decoding’ the thombos, that is, reconstructing the meaning of particular variables in the light of the prevailing legal pluralism in which Sinhalese common law and Roman-Dutch law co-existed uncomfortably. It also summarises research findings from a pilot study involving about two hundred small villages in Colombo province. Finally, it sketches research horizons, as the thombo ‘treasure’ holds great prospects for (comparative) studies into family systems and the impact of colonial rule on fertility and mortality.

This article employs a household survey of low-income working-class households conducted in Tokyo in 1930 to investigate nutritional attainment levels and the relationship between calorie intake and morbidity. We find that the daily calorie intake was 2,118 kcal per adult male equivalent, high enough to satisfy the energy requirements for moderate physical activity. Richer households purchased more expensive calories mainly by substituting meat and vegetables for rice. We find negative associations between morbidity and income and crowding, but no significant associations for nutrition, tentatively suggesting that income and crowding were more important for morbidity in 1930 Tokyo than nutrition.