Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review最新文献

This paper sheds new light on return migration from Australia to the UK in the latter nineteenth century. It uses data from shipping records, and from a random sample of the 23,000 Australian-born in the 1911 Census of England and Wales. Based on these sources, it estimates some 20% of migrants to Australia returned: higher among the wealthy, but still 12% of semi- and unskilled working class migrants returned. There was a preponderance of women among returnees. From that, and other evidence such as the geographic spread of returnees across England, the paper argues that social networks played critical roles in decisions to return.

Controlling entry to an island continent proved more complex than the Immigration Restriction Act, 1901 framers imagined. Chinese people had been coming to Australia in numbers since the 1850s and by 1901 had substantial community, family, and economic links with their Pearl River Delta villages, around the colonies and with Hong Kong and Shanghai. Resistance was fought out on the boats themselves; musters were held, documents examined, searches made, and dictation tests administered. Secrecy, fraud, informers, and harassment reduced but did not eliminate communities while also causing governments much embarrassment before this first attempt at halting boat people was abandoned.

The question of what constitutes the discipline of business history has been the focus of ongoing debate for several decades. The output of business history researchers is diverse ranging from company histories to the application of theoretical frameworks used to interpret the many facets of business development. This article, in introducing this special edition of the Australian Economic History Review, provides an overview of the development of the business history discipline and the contribution it has made to understanding the operation of business enterprises and the markets in which they operate.

This paper reviews the history of human economic activity from the time Homo sapiens appeared to the present. The first aim is to provide a coherent narrative of the economic history of this period. The second aim is to quantify economic activities where time series data is available and to use economic theory to explain the trends and turning points. It examines the history of three central time series – the aggregate human population, output per capita and human-induced species extinctions. It concludes with some brief observations on the contribution of Big Economic History to Big Human History.

Prize winner of the 2020 Asia-Pacific Prize in Economic History, awarded by the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand for the best dissertation in Asia-Pacific Economic History.

This paper examines whether the health system disruption during the Cultural Revolution was the major factor that triggered the malaria outbreak in the early 1970s. The trend of public health expenditure shows that the health system was disrupted from 1968 to 1970. The regression results demonstrate that provinces which experienced a more severe shock to the health system had larger increases in malaria incidence in the early 1970s. The malaria outbreak is found to have negative effects on public health, implying that the health consequence of disease control disruption was not eliminated by the improvement of medical care in rural China.