Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

Environmental conditions significantly affected development in the Asian tropics. This paper investigates the relationship between weather risk and agriculture in four regions with distinct climatological features. Using new data, we estimate the scale of crop output sensitivity to rainfall shocks across ecological zones. Output was sensitive to shocks in regions with low levels, concentrated spells and high volatility of rainfall. Canal irrigation protected some districts while unirrigated regions remained vulnerable. Regions with high rainfall levels and long seasons remained protected. Regions with large interruptions deterred investment and were underdeveloped while regions with small interruptions invited investment-led growth.

The concept remains heavily contested, but can be summarised as the idea that humanity has, through the emission of greenhouse gases associated with industry and agriculture, begun shaping the very geology of our planet.

My thesis begins from this context, from the pressing contemporary conjuncture of fires, floods, ecosystem collapse and – paradoxically – rapid expansion of fossil capital in the form of natural gas, and other follies. It has been argued that this moment calls for ‘urgent histories’ (Rees & Huf, 2020), that the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ ought to ramify through how we approach our work as historians. It is for this reason, that my work considers how the radical implications of our current crises might cause us to reconsider histories of capitalism in Australia.

Debates around the conceptualization of the Anthropocene have generated several neologisms that offer to capture this historic process with greater precision: pyrocene, plantationocene, Cthulucene, necrocene, to name a few. Each brings attention to the limitations of the Anthropocene as an analytic frame. This has been consistently argued by Jason W. Moore; ‘the Anthropocene perspective engages the really big questions of historical change… These are questions that the Anthropocene can pose, but cannot answer’ (Moore, 2016, p. 80). This, due to its reinforcement of the philosophical separation of Society and Nature, and its tendency to homogenise all of humanity into the Anthropos. This too-broad analytic also leads to vast differences in periodisation, with dramatic political implications. Within that conceptual debate, the ‘Capitalocene’ has been proffered as a periodization that is historically, analytically, and politically preferable. This concept clearly names the socioecological relations of capitalism as productive of our current crises. By framing the problem in this way, ‘we move from the consequences of environment-making to its conditions and its causes… [In-so-doing] a new set of connections appears…’ (Moore, 2016, p. 78). We begin to identify the ‘world-ecology’ of capitalism as ‘a relation of capital, power, and nature as an organic whole’ (Ibid., p. 81). It is the argument of my thesis, that capitalism is now the primary determinant of the production of nature, and resultant socioecological crises. We live in a conjuncture of socioecological crisis; we live in the Capitalocene.

For an economic historian, these are strong claims – characterising socioecological relations on the continent of Australia as specifically capitalist, and then arguing that these relations are directly responsible for contemporary socioecological crisis. The twin purpose of this thesis was to develop a theoretical framework to explain and characterise these relations and their internal relationships, but also to specify these theoretical claims historically. The way this was achieved was by deploying the

Loonwonnylowe is an hour-glass-shaped island, of 353 km², lying close off the south-east coast of Tasmania, and now known as Bruny Island. It comprises two bioregions that, with a temperate maritime climate, 250 km of coastline, diverse geology, and hills rising over 500 m, encompass highly variable habitats containing rich suites of natural resources. Over the past 6000 years it was the home of 30 or so Aborigines. The inhabitants maintained close relationships with nearby Tasmanian mainland tribes who lived across a swimmable strait, less than 2 km wide in places. This proximity to the mainland contributed to the rapid obliteration of Loonwonnylowe's inhabitants when, in 1804, British colonists established a permanent settlement, Hobart, just 20 km to the north. British hegemony manifested immediately through wide-scale depredation of the natural resources that were fundamental to the daily existence of Loonwonnylowe's inhabitants. This culminated with the murder, kidnapping, rape, and death of the Aborigines from introduced diseases.

Frontiers in Australia, particularly Tasmania, have attracted extensive historical treatments. Nevertheless, modern histories (for example, Clements, 2013) barely acknowledge the invasion of Loonwonnylowe, despite it suffering Tasmania's earliest European incursions. Loonwonnylowe provides a remarkable location for a microhistorical study of the evolution of a frontier due to its contained island nature, allied with a wealth of ethnographic and historical evidence related to its people and their destruction. My thesis interrogates this evidence.

Chapter 1 introduces the rationale and methodological approach of the study. As an archaeologist, I am trained to extract the maximum of information from minimal material: to employ, for example, a variety of evidence-based techniques on a single piece of shell, a stone flake, or a fugitive hand-print, in order to tell a coherent story of the past. I have applied the same mindset here to documentary sources. I was influenced by the method of enquiry advocated by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess of asking ever-deeper questions of a particular norm, term, or concept, until the basis for a fundamental understanding is reached (Hay, 2002). I was also influenced by the ideas of logical positivists, promulgated by the ‘new archaeology’ of the 1960s and 1970s, who sought to use scientific methods to leverage data to promote, refine, and test hypotheses about the past (Binford, 2001). Silberbauer's (1994) recommendation to perform ‘rescue anthropology’ using ethnohistorical sources in the absence of a traditional forager people to study and question about their past, also resonated with me. Drawing on ethnohistorical sources such as diaries, newspaper accounts, advertising, and shipping news, allows for the emergence of a detailed account of the Aboriginal dispossession. In 1829, the British eventually a

The arrival of the motor car in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century was a signifier of modernity that eventually transformed Australian landscapes, economy and society. The car has been much studied in Australian social and cultural historiographies (Conlon & Perkins, 2001; Davison, 2004), but these have mainly focused on the machines themselves and the people who own them. Continually overlooked are the new areas of work created by the arrival of the car, such as car repair and maintenance. Unlike cars, which have clearly evolved throughout the twentieth century, motor mechanics are perceived as iconic members of Australia's working class, associated with the timeless imagery: young men in grease-stained overalls holding wrenches. Rather than contributing to a sense of the mechanic's timelessness, however, this thesis historicises the work they performed and how it changed over the twentieth century.

This thesis explores the emergence of the motor mechanic trade in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century and follows its development through to 1970. By this time, the key developments this thesis explores – the process through which mechanics became emblematic members of the working-class, associated with the particularly masculine “grease monkey” stereotype – was effectively complete. This study builds upon previous work internationally, notably Borg (2007), which documents a history of the mechanic trade in the United States. In doing so, however, it seeks to build upon our understanding of class in a particularly Australian context. The working-class identity that mechanics are heavily associated with today was not inherent in their origins. Rather, its creation was historical process that aligns to theories of class formation presented in the works of Thompson (1968), Connell and Irving (1992).

The dissertation contains seven chapters, organised by three major time periods. Chapters One and Two explore the origins of the trade and its formalisation. This includes transformations in class relations early in the twentieth century as the motor car arrived in Australia. Chapters Three and Four cover the disruptions of the Second World War, both from a military and civilian perspective, and how the war changed the direction of the trade. The final three chapters present the core developments that led to the lowering of the status of mechanics, both from a sociocultural, labour and economic perspective.

This thesis begins by exploring skill as a historical concept, drawing on the work of Ben Maddison, who himself adopts the theories of Antonio Gramsci. Maddison (1995, 2007) suggests the old understanding of ‘artisanal skill’ was characteristically mysterious, unknowable to outsiders but instinctual to – and thus controlled by – craftsmen. Industrialisation undermined this ‘mystery’, removing the control of knowle

This article examines the human toll of the 1944–1945 famine in Java, Indonesia's main island. It estimates birth and death rates for the Indonesian population in Java during 1941–1951. Using the net population loss method, the article approximates a net loss of 3.3 million people during the 1942–1945 Japanese occupation period. This includes 1.8 million excess deaths; 0.7 million during 1944 and 1.1 million during 1945. The remainder are 1.4 million missing births in 1944 and 1945, associated with the malnutrition of women of childbearing ages and physical separation of wives from husbands recruited by Japanese authorities for forced labour.

Land pawning is considered inefficient because it causes property rights to be unclearly delineated. Despite this, it once prevailed worldwide. We propose that this system flourished when state capacity was weak and the private sector spontaneously managed public affairs. Local collaboration made it difficult to sell land outright to an outsider who might be an unreliable collaborator. Land pawning granted the pawner's family and neighbours a ‘probation’ period to observe the pawnee's behaviour. If they found the pawnee irresponsible, they could still redeem the land. Data compiled from contracts in Qing Taiwan support our hypothesis.

Using 1930s panel data from Osaka City, we estimate the production function in the metal and machinery sectors in Japan to identify the factors that influence the establishment of mass-production methods. Subcontracting income per total revenue had a positive correlation with metal and machinery output. While material-intensive technology was used, scale-economy-type technology was not observed in this sector. The greater return on capital for smaller plants was attributed to efficient capital stock utilisation and subsistence wages. The division of labour between firms, through which materials and parts were traded, contributed to output expansions in the 1930s.

This special issue of the Asia Pacific Economic History Review explores the impact of colonisation on Indigenous populations across the Pacific and American West from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Three of the contributing articles examine ways of modelling Indigeous populations at point of contact and the scale and pace of subsequent declines. A further two explore the problematics of counting violent deaths on the frontier and reconstructing the factors motivating settler aggression. The last article examines the impact of colonisation on sex ratios and the implications of this for marriage rates between and within different ethnicities.

This research considers the current New Zealand conventional wisdom of a Māori contact-era population of 100,000 circa-1770 using a variety of population density analogues. The first set of analogues examines estimated population densities of six districts in early-contact period New Zealand for which reasonable population estimates can be constructed using methods of historical demography. The second set examines estimated population densities of pre-industrial societies on large, relatively isolated temperate islands outside of New Zealand. The density research indicates that a contact-era Māori population in excess of 200,000 is a distinct possibility. Based on this density analysis the current conventional wisdom's figure of 100,000 appears to be—considerably—on the low side, and suggesting considerable catastrophic early post-contact population decline.