Economic History and Policy: A Critical Historiography of Australian Traditions*

Christopher Lloyd

I

Of all the branches of historical enquiry only economic history makes claims (usually implicitly) to scientific precision and policy applicability, In Australia these claims are connected with the institutionally and methodologically close association that the dominant stream of economic history writing has with orthodox economics. This special position of association with and separation from, the most politically powerful of the social sciences has recently given economic history a degree of influence in Australia not matched by other branches of history. But there is a good deal of dissension over methodology among all those who study the history of the economy. In this chapter I shall examine the methodologies of the various streams for their inherent explanatory strengths and come to some assessment of their political and economic influence. I shall argue that the dominant stream - applied neoclassical economics - is too narrow in methodology and theoretical orientation. The reliance on methodological individualism, positivism, and neo-classical growth theories, and the lack of attention to social structure and politics that applied neoclassicism exhibits, weaken its explanatory power and therefore undermine its claim to provide policy advice. This is particularly regrettable because three dimensions that are essential to Australian economic thought - concerns with long-nm and comparative perspectives on Australian economic development and a central concern with real-world economic problems - are provided by economic history. If applied neo- classicism could be more open to the political, social, and cultural dimensions and causes of economic change its explanatory and hence policy strength would be increased. But the problems of methodological individualism and positivism would remain.

Economic historians have always seen themselves as engaged in a more narrow and explanatorily focused enterprise than general historians. Economic historians have usually striven, in one way or another, to provide causal explanations of changes in economic sysrem and structures. This has been their main motivation whereas the motivations of and productions of general historians have been somewhat different and more diverse. Although the question of causal explanation has often been raised in association with general history, and also often rejected, general historians have often wanted to go “beyond mere explanation” to provide meaningful interpretations of actions, epochs, and events. Until recently the problem of social structural change has been ignored by most of them but it is now being discussed more widely because of the influence that the social sciences have come to have in modem society and culture. Once only Marxists and a few

* I thank Malcolm Fallars for helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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other sociologically-informed general historians were structurally attuned. Now the conventional barriers between kinds of history writing - political, economic, social, intellectual, cultural - have broken down as concepts of actions, socid processes, and social structures; methodologies for studying and interpreting them; and theories for explaining them, are all becoming increasingly lotalising in their scope. That is, there are tendencies towards widening rather than narrowing the subject matter and towards using appropriate methodologies and theories. The academic discipline of economic history, however, has had a somewhat contrary evolution in that in recent decades there has been a tendency in some quarters towards a narrowing of both subject matter and theory.

Although forms of historical political economy have been written ever since the late eighteenth century in Britain and France, institutionalised academic studies of the history of economies did not begin until the mid-to-late nineteenth century in Germany and the end of the century in Britain. At fxst in the Anglophone world such studies were, like general history, somewhat eclectic and untheoretical. in contrast to Germanic work. They included a wide range of subjects, some of which later became known as labour history and social history. But as the twentieth century progressed they became narrower in focus and more technical in their theories and research. The “new” economic history of recent decades has been in effect a branch of applied quantitative economics - testing abstract theories against historical data about the economy, narrowly conceived. Against this, however, there has begun to be developed a more institutionalist approach that attempts once again to widen the scope to include attention to the role of institutions, especially governments and distributive coalitions, in the history of economies. And all the while the “old” economic history with its broader scope and narrative method has continued to be practised alongside these other streams. Despite these differences it is possible to compare directly these economic approaches because they have broad agreement on the centrality of the issues of material production and economic growth and development, even if they conceptualise and theorise these issues somewhat differently.

All of these streams of work have existed in Australia but until recently this country lacked any well-developed sociological alternatives to these economic approaches to explaining the history of the economy.’ There has been a “mdical” tradition of historical political economy which has concentrated on class struggle and other sources of conflict and inequality and the problems of nationalism and democracy. This did not have a strong formally theoretical or systemic perspective. In recent years, social-relational approaches, based on Marxism but often drawing inspiration from other sociological and political- economy sources, have been developed. Australia also has a rich tradition in historical geography and this has overlapped a good deal with the concerns of economic historians. In fact, some of the best work on Australian economic history has been done by geographers from within a more totalising structural framework than that provided by orthodox economic reasoning.

There are methodological and theoretical gaps between the four broad kinds of approach - economic, political, sociological. and geographical - such that they seem, on the surface at least, to be trying to explain somewhat different phenomena and processes. Even among the economic approaches there are significant differences, although they all try to explain economic change by reference primarily to economic causes. The “old” economic history tends to see the central issue as one of describing and explaining the history of an actual complex of socio-economic behaviour, institutions, and particular actions and events. The neo-classical “new” economic history is trying to explain growth and development of the economy construed in the narrower terms of a

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more or less autonomous system of material production. These writers refer largely to the abstract factors of production - land, labour, and capital - and how they relate to each other in precisely measurable ways. Institutionalist economic history tends to see the central issue in wider terms as the evolution of the economy as a structure of institutions. Production for these writers is not abstracted from all political processes although they too concentrate on explaining economic change.

The non-economic approaches see the issues very differently. Radical historical political economy is more interested in questions of national economic independence, distributive justice, equality, and democracy, and so concentrates on power relations within the international economy and the relationship between politics and the economy. Sociological approaches, including Marxism, see the question of economic change as one of socio-structural history, usually preferring to conceptualise the economy primarily as a realm of social relations rather than an organisation of behaviour and resources. Geographical approaches concentrate on human interaction with the environment as the main locus of structural evolution and economic behaviour. I believe these differences are unfortunate because at bottom all these approaches are in fact attempting to explain the same broad process of structural history. Furthermore, an adequate theoretical framework for explaining the long-run of Australia's (or any other country's) economic history, construed in a wide sense, would seem to require attention to all the following elements: the geographical environment; resource endowments; technological developments; the aggregated interactions of factors of production within Australia and the world market; the motivations of and conflicts between owners of factors of production; class relations in the work place and at the political level; cultural belief systems about economic activity; the role of ideologies, politics, governments, legal systems, and other institutions; and in general the place of Australia in the emerging world political economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My view is that economic historians should be trying to show how all these have interacted to produce structural change and development of the economy in the long run and a particular distribution of production and wealth, as well as simple growth of production. Indeed, I shall be arguing herein that they cannot adequately explain growth without first explaining structural change for it is the latter that makes possible the former. To achieve these wider aims explanations crucially require attention to the complex motivation of and structuring consequences of collective human action. I shall say more about this in section 111.

This chapter is an attempt to construct an essay in critical historiography.2 In what follows I shall attempt to employ some concepts and arguments drawn from recent philosophy of explanation, particularly as they have been employed to analyse the explanatory structures used in the social sciences.3 Philosophy of social science is relevant here because history writing should be considered as part of the social sciences, not as some separate kind of sui generis discourse. History is in fact an explanatory discipline and should be judged accordingly, even if its practitioners claim to be interpreters rather than social scientists. Historical interpretations and explanations cannot help making use of generalisations of an economic, psychological and sociological kind (often in a partial, elliptical and underdeveloped form) to construct what should be seen as causal accounts of its chosen objects. Whatever else historians provide in the form of commentary upon national and moral questions is subsidiary. If they only provide commentaries andor chronologies they are not really historians. Of course economic

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historians have long recognised that their task is to make causal explanations. My attention is focused primarily on the methodological foundations of their explanations.

In addition, since methodology is directly related to claims about explanatory power andlor scientificity a methodological critique also bears upon the question of policy applicability. To put it another way, socio-economic “engineers” rest their claim to be such upon explicit or implicit explanatory methodology. A critique of methodology can therefore lead to a critique of policy, which I shall sketch in section IV.

Europeanised Australia was born at a decisive time in world history and its birth was one small consequence of the nature of the time. Although the participants were not very aware of it, the industrial revolution was occurring in Britain and parts of Europe with its concomitant social, political, and cultural upheavals. The growth in crime of the eighteenth century in Britain was one probable consequence of socio-economic change. Material questions about economic progress, social change, dislocation, and inequality were moving to the centre of European thought. Economic questions came to dominate reflective thought in and about Australia from the very beginning to a degree not Seen in any previous European colonising venture.

Enquiries into and discussions about the economic and social structure of the Australian colonies began with W. C. Wentworth, J. T. Bigge, and E. G. Wakefield in the 1819 to 1829 period. Wentworth‘s Statistical, Historical, and Political Description4 of 1819 was a pioneering work of some significance in historical political economy. Bigge’s Reports5 of the early 1820s also contained a politicat economy perspective, and Wakefield‘s Letter From Sydney6 of 1829, while based on secondary reading only, was one of the outstanding works on the economics of colonisation of the time. All of these writers were to a greater or lesser extent representative of the growing influence of political economy, and Wakefield in particular exhibited a strong interest in the socially-reforming consequences of utilitarian policies.

There was a good deal of discussion in Britain from the 1820s onward among economists and politicians about the merits of colonisation7 but many of the writers, unlike Wakefield and a few other Philosophic Radicals, did not raise the question of the desirability and/or viability of particular kinds of economic and social sfructure in colonies of recent settlement. Karl M m took up this issue in hi well known final chapter of Capital, Volume One in which he discussed the question of the social structure of New World colonies. He criticised Wakefield‘s failure to realise fully the significance of social relations of production.* In Marx’s theory, the process of the origins and development of capitalism as a mode of production was one whereby the contractual relations of capitalist to wage labourer, in which the ownership of instruments of production was separate from their employment by the worker, was born out of the dissolution of pre-capitalist relations, in which instruments of production were owned by the direct producer. In the colonies of recent settlement there was a shortage of labourers willing to work for landowners and capitalists because of the abundance of cheap land. Wakefield‘s “systematic colonization” was aimed at preventing working class immigrants from acquiring land ux, easily thus forcing them to remain as proletarians. Wakefield implicitly and Marx explicitly believed that a capitalist socioeconomic structure was the essential precondition for economic growth and development.

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Marx did not inspire other more detailed enquiries into the socio-economic structure and history of colonial Australia until well into the twentieth century. Rather, Australian economic history writing in the sense of a relatively distinct branch of enquiry was from the outset (around the turn of the century) conducted within a factors-of-production and inductive empirical framework9 This framework owed little to explicit economic theory and nothing to model-building techniques, of course. The main (implicit) inspiration was an empiricism of fact gathering and some "common-sense" assumptions about human motivation and economic and political relationships. Work conducted within this framework by political conservatives and liberals alike came to constitute the methodological orthodoxy of "old" economic history. Examples of methodological orthodoxy include the work of Coghlan, Shann, and, more recently, Blainey.

The major pioneering effort by the NSW statistician T. A. Coghlan - Labour and Industry in Australia, four volumes*o (1918) - strongly influenced, both positively and negatively, most subsequent work for several decades. Coghlan was a world pioneer in the 1880s of careful gathering and ordering of official statistics and a pioneer of national accounting. The methodology of his important book was essentially "factual" in the sense of presenting quantitative material with a linking narrative. There was no explicit theory or model of economic growth or structural change nor, of course, advanced statistical techniques. On the other hand, as would be expected of the NSW statistician, he did employ a wealth of statistical data to support an implicit theory of growth. He also discussed at length social and political developments, insofar as they affected the development of the economy. The book also exhibits an interest in social class differences and class interaction, although there is no theory of classes, class consciousness, or class struggle. This interest in classes, industrial relations, and politics is a legacy perhaps of nineteenth-century political economy and the much more palpable existence of social and political conflict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than in more recent times. This interest also seems to be a reflection of a faintly discernible liberalism and a Whiggish concern with social progress that constitute Coghlan's moral and political outlook.11

In the interwar period there was an upsurge in the production of economic historiography. The two general economic histories that stand out - Edward Shann's Economic History'* (1930) and Brian Fitzpatrick's two volumes on British Imperialism and Ausfruliu (1939) and The British Empire in Australia, (1941)13 - make a strongly contrasting pair in terms of theoretical and political orientation, arguments, and emphases. But both, like Coghlan, were concerned with narrating and explaining significant events and processes. And both, like Coghlan, included political and social elements in their accounts and explanations. ?he economy as a realm of action was not abstracted from the rest of society and not treated as a structural or statistically aggregated entity.

Shann's book was written from a strongly pro-imperial and free enterprise perspective. He was concerned not only with telling the story of the development of the economy as a series of events, actions, and patterns of behaviour but was particularly interested in the processes of administrative and political decision-making and policy about economic matters. In that sense the book is not markedly different from works of general history written in the interwar period. Fitzpauick's books were very distinctive and inaugurated a quite different tradition, in spite of sharing certain methodological traits with Shann, as I shall show in a moment.

In more recent times, Geoffrey Blainey has continued to work within the "old" narrative perspective, telling colourful stories about miners, seafarers, entrepreneurs,

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politicians, Aborigines, and so on.14 Attempts at quantification and structural enquiry or the extcnded use of theory are rare in his work and generally unsophisticated. His underlying assumptions about the importance of free enterprise and racial unity are largely unexamined, or at least they were until the mid-1980s when a storm broke over his explicit attempts to promote conservative political and racial views.

A new methodology for economic history, based on nco-classical economic theory, was first developed in the United States in the 1950s.I5 This framework is theoretical, technical, and abstract, whereas the old orthodoxy has been common-sensical, narrative, and personal. This shift is based not so much on detailed counting (as the name “cliometrics” misleadingly indicates) but on a concern with systems and aggregates, and with using economic models and theories, and sometimes econometric techniques. The aim is not to tell a slory about actions and events but to analyse the process of growth and development of an aggregated systemic entity. Precise “scientific” explanation is now the goal for many such practitioners.

Let me mention three Australian examples that may seem to fall within this general economistic approach - N. G. Butlin‘s Investment in Australian Economic

(1964), E. A. Bochm‘s Twentieth Century Economic Development of AustraliaI7 (1971), and W. A. Sinclair‘s The Process of Economic Development in Australia.’* (1976). All three, like much recent economic historiography and unlike the old orthodoxy, abstract the economy from the rest of society’s institutions, relations, and activities, in order to explain economic growth and development fundamentally in terms of economic causes. Butlin’s book employs three main methodological devices: a concentration on economic factors, economic growth theory, and a wealth of painstakingly marshalled statistical data about the history of the economy organised on the basis of national income accounting categories. As such his book exhibits the strengths of a careful attention to empirical detail, an absence of unwarranted speculation, and the inductive assertibility of conclusions. Similarly, Bochm’s book employs abstract economic categories, theories, and data to explain long-run changes in growth and development. He does include more discussion than Butlin or Sinclair on the importance of economic institutions and government policies in promoting and hindering growth but the socio-political origins and effects of institutions and policies are not explored.

Sinclair’s work is highly theoretical and abstract. Individual people or particular groups do not figure in his book. The process of economic development takes place in abstract. A pure economic model provides the concepts, categories, and explanations for understanding the flow of factors of production between Australia and Europe. Sinclair’s book is a good example of applied economic theory. In recent years there have been published several more outstanding examples of applied economic theory -notably the collective works edited by Maddock and McLean, Gregory and Butlin, and Chapmanlg - which examine Australia’s economic development using explicit neo-claqsical growth theory and national accounting data.

These books, however, are not good examples of the ideal type of applied neo- classicism. They have not primarily been concerned with constructing and employing an instrumental, ahistorical, model, but rather with making an explanation of a concrete historical process of systemic change. But they do remain on the level of the economy when explaining economic processes. What makes them “new” is their combination of a behavioural conception of economic reality, which directs attention to a particular locus of historical causation; an explicit use of economic theories and models; reliance upon only quantitative economic data; and economic aggregation. I shall discuss the

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significance of these in the next section. It is important to emphasise here that quantifcation and aggregation is not sufficient to distinguish “new” from “old” methodologies. In practice most economic historians now quantify and aggregate to a greater or lesser extent but the “old“ ones remain more or less wedded to the idea of telling a story about economic behaviour and events and do not see themselves as applied economists in the way that the “new” ones do.

The radical political economy approach to economic history, epitomised by Brian Fitzpatrick, has its cultural and political roots in the labour movement of the 1880s and 1890s. His two books are together a history of the economy written largely from the point of view of class struggle at the level of the state. That is, administrative and political decisions are seen by him as paramount in accounting for the development of the economy. So his books contain a good deal of discussion about why certain governmental decisions were made: about imperial policy; about conflicts between agrarian, mercantile, and working classes: about struggles over democracy and property: and so on. A major part of his theoretical framework is the imperial context in the senses of its influence on decision-making, the growing economic division of labour and unequal exchange, and the conflicts at the level of the emerging Australian state over dependence versus independence. Structural change was what he primarily wished to explain, not economic growth in a narrow sense. There is not much abstraction. statistical aggregation, or economic theory in his books. But there is a strong commitment to the reality, as powerful determinants of action, of state apparatuses, inherited and achieved class alignments, and structures of economic organisation. Marxism is in a sense the ghost at the feast. While there is virtually no mention of it in these books it seems to play an indirect role in directing Fitzpatrick’s attention to the importance of classes and class struggle. But that alone is far from sufficient to w m t labelling his work “Marxist” because there is obviously much more to Marxism than simply an interest in class struggle. Rather, what makes Fitzpatrick a “radical” in the Australian sense is his commitment to examining the roots of and national consequences of economic and political dependence on the empire as well as the sympathetic attention he gives to the struggles of the labour movement. This kind of left-wing nationalist radicalism is present in the work of several other economic, social, and labour historians, among whom could be mentioned Russel Ward, Robin Gollan, Ian Turner, Ted Wheelwright, Ken Buckley, and Peter Cochrane.20

Recent institutionalism, like radical political economy, is in some respects a return to the concerns that animated the nineteenth century political economists because they too explicitly raise issues of national economic policy and political conflicts between interest groups. But the influences here are quite different from those on the radicals. Rather, we should look for influence partly to recent institutionalist economics, especially in America. This new institutionalism is concerned with the economic roles of interest groups such as trade unions and cartels; of legal institutions such as property laws and voting systems; of the organisational structures of states and quasi-governmental instrumentalities; and of ideologies about production, distribution and rationality. Such work has helped give rise in recent years to a body of institutionalist economic history writing, epitomised by the work of Mancur Olson and Douglass North in America2* They are concerned with long-run growth and development in the world economy and of the roles of interest groups, public choice, and allocative efficiency in development. This new institutionalism, however, should really be seen as a reform movement within analytical neo-classical economics, attempting to add into the rationalist neo-classical equation about growth some of the institutionalist factors mentioned above.

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There has begun to be developed in Australia a body of institutionaIist economic history but it does not yet seem to owe much to these writers, although Olson has discussed how well his approach and theory applies to Australian development.22 A central concern with policies and politics can be seen, for example, in the work of C. B. Schedvin and some of the recent writings of Noel Butlin. Schedvin’s outstanding book Australia in the Great Depression23 (1970) is characterised by a close attention to the influence of politics and ideology on economic decision-making and economic understanding. He gives a central place to the role of institutions, interest groups, and coalitions of interests. The book employs a mixture of theory, economic analysis, and narrative of decisions, actions, and events. As such the book transcends the “old” economic history but does not become an example of neo-classical institutionalism of the American kind. It is resolutely a work of historical enquiry rather than of applied theory, attempting carefully to reconstruct a historical process.

On the other hand Butlin’s collaborative book with Barnard and Pincus on Government and Capitalism (1982) and some of his essays,24 are closer in theory and argument to the applied institutionalist economics of Olson and North. Butlin was long concerned with, among other things, how decisions about public and private investment, economic regulation, and allocation of wealth affected the long-run economic development of Australia. He did not exhibit a strong interest in the social and political processes that led to certain decisions, rather in the detail of and the long-run macroeconomic consequences of those decisions. In other words, the pattern of economic development can only be explained, in this perspective, by attention to, among other things, the institutional framework of economic behaviour. But it is always behaviour that is thought to be economically rational in the sense o l seeking for persod and group material advantage through forming coalitions and using the apparatus of the state at all its levels.

Marxist writers about Australian economic history have produced many analyses since the late 1960s. Three of the most notable contributions to Marxist economic historiography have been R. W. Connell and T. Irving’s Class Structure in Australian History25 (1980), Philip McMichael’s Settlers and the Agrarian Question26 (1984), and K. Buckley and E. L. Wheelwright’s No Paradise fur Workers27 (1988). All exhibit some of the general methodological characteristics of Marxism but there are significant differences in the details of their approaches and their theories of AustraIian economic history. COMCU and Irving are very explicit about their presuppositions and methodological standpoint “people facing the task of changing society need an accurate account of the way it came into being and the way it has worked up till now. This has to be a history of the society as a whole, not just bits and pieces of it; the problem is to write the history of a structure.”28 By “structure” they mean a structure of class relations; and an analysis of class is an analysis of social power and therefore is concerned with the political nature of the entire social structure. They expressly opposed two other methodologies - “bourgeois individualism”, which treats society as a multitude of competing individuals, and “unitarian philosophies”, which treat society as a pre-given holistic unity. For them society is a structured whole, “bound together by relationships that also divide it, and that define the directions in which it may be changed”.29 Structure is an historical production and so cannot be analysed apart from the events that constitute the process of class interaction.

Accordingly, their account of Australian history analyses the forms of class conflict and accommodation, not as an abstract process but in terms of real actions and events. The influence of powerful individuals and ideologies was given full attention. In fact their

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book is not an economic history in the way that all the other examples discussed here are. They are not interested in producing a history of the economy because they refuse to recognise the existence of the economy as some separate, however abstracted, level or sub-system. Rather, it is classes that are for them the basic reality and their significance is supposedly manifested in all aspects of social life,

Not all Marxists agree with the strong emphasis on social class conflict that Connell and Irving adopt. In contrast, McMichael‘s book is certainly a work of economic history. He describes it as “a structural history of colonial development” and focuses on capital accumulation in the pastoral sector in the context of world economic relations.3o As such, he resurrects the emphasis of Fitzpatrick upon examining the central importance to Australia of imperialism, and a f f i i s the emphasis of Immanuel Wallerstein upon the context of the developing capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth century in which to examine Australian capitalist wool production. For much of his analysis he relies upon existing non-Marxist secondary literature, unlike Connell and Irving, but where his account diverges significantly from previous ones is in terms of his analysis of class relations both in the wool industry and between Australian pastoralists. as peripheral agrarian capitalists, and metropolitan industrial and commercial capitalists.

Buckley and Wheelwright also concentrate on class struggle within production and at the level of the state. Their book is a deliberate attempt to write an accessible history relatively free from explicit methodological and theoretical arguments. They do not provide an abstract or statistical analysis but a narrative account of the main events, episodes, and processes. These are selected according to the theory of economic and political class struggle but their‘s is not a work in class theory or analysis as such, unlike that of Connell and Irving. Individuals and particular events bulk large in Buckley and Wheelwright’s account

Finally within the Marxist tradition it is important to mention the work of Donald Denoon, who has made a valuable contribution to providing a comparative theoretical framework for Australia and other regions of European settlement in the nineteenth century in his book Settler Capitalism (1983).31 Historians from other viewpoints have also begun to explore such a framework but the significance of Denoon’s work is that he has gone well beyond the others in the subtlety and power of his relations-of-production approach derived from Marxist political economy.

As this indicates, there are already “old” and “new” vefsions of Marxist economic history, depending on the degree of theoretical determination. The “old” versions, of which Connell and Irving’s, and Buckley and Wheelwright’s books are examples, deal, like “old” economic history and radical political economy, with actual people, events, groups, classes, and institutions and employ a largely narrative presentation. The “new”, as shown in McMichael’s and Denoon’s books, tend to be more versions of applied Marxist theory that deal with abstract structures, classes, and categories and have an analytical presentation. But these differences are not as significant as the similarities between Marxists and their collective opposition to the abstracted empiricism of neo- classicism .

As I mentioned briefly in the first section of this chapter, historical geography has had a rich tradition in Australia, often contributing significantly to the study of economic history via its concern with environmental change brought about by human occupation. Being geographical it is perforce interested in long-run, large-scale processes, and being historical it is interested in how human behavioural patterns have interacted with the natural environment The work of Meinig, Price, Jeans, Powell, Williams, B ~ l t o n , ~ ~ and

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others on Australia has been of great significance for explaining economic development. Spate’s three volumes on the Pacific33 and Powell’s recent Historical Geography of Modern Australia34 (1988) are outstanding examples of the interdisciplinary, synthetic strength of historical geography and close connection with economic history.

Summarising, we can see that there are now in fact six kinds of approach to explaining the history of Australia‘s economic growth and development.

First “old” economic history, which has roots as far back as the early colonial period, although it is still practised. It deals with the economic decisions and actions of real individuals and groups without much use of economic theory. A narrative method of presentation is adopted.

Second, “new ” economic history (or applied neo-classical economics) which has been developed only since the 1960s. It concentrates on abstractions about the interactions between land, labour, and capital, and employs economic growth theory and national income accounting models. In contrast with “old” economic history it is much more quantitative and systematic in its use of theory. A more mathematically sophisticated version is known as “cliometrics” or “econometric history” because of its concentration on the use of econometric techniques for abstract theory testing.

Third, institutionalist economic history, which marries neo-classical theories about growth and development with concrete analyses of government policy and decisions and the actions of institutionalised interest groups.

Fourth, radical historical political economy of the kind epitomised by the work of Brian Fitzpatrick, which concentrates on class relations and the actions of classes, groups, and individuals, and sees as central the linked questions of national economic independence, social justice, and democracy.

Fifth, historical geography, which examines economic change in a context of environmental influences, constraints, and change.

Sixth, Marxist political economy, which has been articulated in the last few years. This approach is not mainly interested in explaining growth. Rather, its main aims are to explain economic structural development, class relations, the distribution of wealth and power, quality of life, and the degree of social advancement of oppressed classes. The question of economic growth in a narrow sense is subsidiary because it is seen as dependent on more sociological and political forces. Marxism in general can be Seen as a sociological approach to economic change. Although there have been developed in other countries other kinds of sociological approaches lo economic history, such as the Weberian, social-psychological, and structural-functionalist, they have not yet been used to explain the history of the Australian economy.

When we examine the philosophical assumptions about the general nature of the social world (ontology) and of how to gain knowledge of it (epistemology) that these six approaches embody in various ways, two main lines of cleavage that separate them can be seen. First is an ontological cleavage between individualism and structuralism, in which the basic socio-economic reality is taken to be either the behaviour of individual actors, whether persons or institutions such as f m s and governments that seem to act as individuals, or irreducible structures of social, institutional and political relations. Second is an epistemological cleavage between instrumentalism, which sees the explanatory task as one of manipulating and interpreting models and sets of data, and realism which sees

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the task as describing and explaining real particular cases of behavioural and structural ~hange.3~ Another way of viewing this epistemological distinction is to see it as an abstract model-building-and-applying approach versus an inductive historical approach to explanation.

Two versions of individualism derive from the utilitarian tradition in economics, in which economic phenomena and processes are studied as collective consequences of individual decisions and actions. Firstly, an individualist-instrumetualist approach to explaining economic processes and history employs a conception of economic actors as abstracted individuals who interact as owners, sellers, and buyers of factors of production. This concentrates on the rationality of decision-making by these owners (landlords, capitalists, and labourers) in seeking to maximise retums from the employment of their factors. In the purest conception, knowledge about the economy is instrumental in the sense that “reality” is not being examined because it is believed to be a virtually meaningless concept. Rather, the economy is a set of statistical aggregates which is available for examination and manipulation through the use of theory and techniques, which are the counterpart of experiments. This idea comes from empiricist-positivism, mainly via Paul Samuelson and Milton Freidman under the influence of philosophers Carl Hempel and Rudolf Carnap. They see the route to scientific explanation lying through observations, hypotheses, abstract mathematised model-building, and deductive conclusions. Unobservable entities such as personalities, intentions, cultural beliefs, and social structures, are often ignored or ruled out as being unsusceptible to observation and quantification and hence having no place in science. At its most abstract the aim of positivists is to construct an internally coherent and workable hypothetico-deductive model and to obtain statistically meaningful conclusions. Economic historians, however, unlike theoretical economists, do have to remain on the plane of what really happened but the use of some modern economic theories and techniques tends to lead some neo-classically-inspired cliometric historians perilously (and incoherently) close to instrumentalism.

Secondly, an individualist-realist approach does not abandon real actors in favour of abstracted individuals. Rather, it directs attention to examining and explaining the activities of historically real people, their behavioural patterns, and actual events. The main methodological presupposition is that the economy consists essentially of individuals with varying degrees of resources and personal power who intemct and make exchanges in variously free and constrained ways. This form of individualism is realist in the sense of the empirical realism of sensory evidence, which has a long history in Anglophone philosophy and historiography, and in the sense of dealing with real people. The economy supposedly has no supra-individual structural reality, although there is some ambivalence, even incoherence, in this attitude. Methodological individualists cannot avoid using concepts, at least, about rules, laws, relations, and social networks, all of whose ontological status is uncertain in their work.

In opposition to the two versions of individualism, a third approach, structuralist-reali, takes as its starting point a concept of society as consisting fundamentally of dynamic processes of collective social structuring rather than of individuals and their behaviour. These structures can be of many sorts but the essential idea is that the economy has a form that is an organisation of rules, roles, positions, and relations that are institutionalised. ”hat is, institutions consist of networks or structures which people are born into andlor develop over time. The basic task of those employing such a conception is to examine how the evolving economy develops through the

72 Economic History

aggregated and collective decisions and actions of people. The economy’s relatively continuous and powerful structural forms are reproduced and modified by the further decisions and actions that those forms condition. Such an explanatory foundation necessarily produces a historical approach to socio-economic explanation. With the individualist-instrumentalist foundation there is the possibility of a static or ahistorical approach because it allows the application to the past of theories developed to deal with present conditions.

Some indications have already been given about how these foundational concepts are inherent in and help illuminate the six existing approaches to writing Australian economic history, Old and new versions of orthodox economic history both employ individualist conceptions of the economy. The major methodological difference between them is in the particular uses made of theory and quantitative techniques. At one extreme are some cliometricians who verge on being instrumentalists in that the statistical data and the techniques they use are divorced from any conception of trying to explain the reality of the past. But there are very few such practitioners in Australia. At the opposite end are “old“ economic historians who concentrate on trying to describe the recorded behaviour of particular people.

All the other four approaches seem to be informed to a greater or lesser extent by structuralist-realism, whether they take a sociological (usually Marxist), institutional, political, or geographical orientation to the question of Australian economic change. The Marxist version of a sociological approach concentrates on the socio-political power relations between owners of different wcalled factors, grouped into antagonistic social classes, and acting in their perceived class interests. Classes are the basic structural units and class action the most important structuring process. Institutionalism sees economic reality as consisting fundamentally of organisations both as actors in their own right and as the context for personal and group structuring decisions and actions. The organisations have powers and histories qua organisations. Historical geography is not in itself a particular approach, containing in fact many divergent methodologies and theories. Nevertheless, they mostly seem to share a structuralist notion about space, system, and time in that these are conceived as being in a dynamic interaction between environmental continuities and transformative human action.

So, the bottom line seems to be a broad dichotomy between (ambivalent) individualism and strucluralism. The relevance of realism of one kind or another cannot ultimately be disputed for economic historians, being historians rather than economists, must try to explain what really happened, in spite of the tendencies to instrumentalism by some econometric historians. The basic philosophical problem, then, is the nature of economic reality, and (by implication) of persons.

The basic theoretical problem is how to explain the historical change and development of the economy, given particular conceptions of the economy, social actors. and rationality. The theories of personality and action that individualist and structuralist approaches have are markedly different. In the individualist approaches people are taken to be rational individuals with more-or-less fixed dispositions towards self-interest. In the structuralist approaches, social groups, classes, and institutions take on some of the attributes and powers of social actors, and people are structurally-conditioned and group-oriented as well as having powers as social agents. And whereas in the structuralist approaches it is assumed to be rational for people to act in group, class, or institutional interests and that groups, classes, and institutions have their own structural rationality, in the individualist approaches rationality is associated with competitive individual action.

Christoper Lloyd 73

Thus the locus of and impetus for economic change is fundamentally different in the two cases. Structuralists will search mainly for the structural consequences (intended and unintended) of institutionalised, largely routinised, collective thought and action which is occasionally innovative and even radically restructuring. Individualists will search mainly for the decisions and decisive actions of powerfil individuals and small loosely-structured groups.

Associated with these differences of conception and theory is a different emphasis upon the use of statistical data and abstract models. Here the issue is one of the relationship of data, models, and theories to what is taken to be social reality. Because neo-classical economic theory tends to adopt an empiricist conception of knowledge attention is focused only on that which can be observed and reduced to statistical data. Marxists, other sociological historians. and some institutionalist economic historians, are not opposed to statistical techniques but their data gathering is usually subordinated to theories about the layers of reality (some of which are in principle unobservable) rather than to abstractions from observations about actions and behaviour. Epistemological realists see a more complex relationship between theory and evidence - each is partly embedded in the other. Whereas positivists see data as largely theory-neutral, realists see it as partly theory-laden. Most Marxists and similar macro-sociologists, and some institutional economists insofar as they are structuralists and realists, search for the often hidden but real and powerful rules, roles, and relations that structure society and bring people into conflict and alliance.

Now, when we come to the concrete level of explaining Australian economic history the fundamental problem for the structuralist approaches involves how to conceptuali the economic, social, and ideological structure of Australia at various times. For them the question of the causes of economic growth and development is a subsidiary theoretical problem, the answer to which will depend largely upon the answers given to the prior questions about structures, institutions, and consciousness.

That the two kinds of question have this explanatory order is not agreed, however, by defenders of the individualist economic approaches. They hold (tacitly at least) that the problem of conceptualising structure and consciousness is of little significance. They now see their main task as employing economic growth theories, such as the staple and Cobb-Douglas theories, which are designed to show how the factors of production were brought together under the peculiar conditions of colonial Australia, including resource abundance, labour scarcity, and remote markets. This is not to deny that the sociological and institutional approaches also employ economic growth theories, as they rightly should, even ones drawn from neo-classical economics. Rather, the point is that theories are employed by them in a wider framework of concepts about modes of production, forms of surplus appropriation, institutional arrangements and affinities, and social conflict For them the basic questions concern how the various sociological structures of production and/or institutional organisations combined and conflicted through social classes and/or interest groups and ideologies to produce the particular forms of capitalist accumulation and economic development that took place.

Insofar as historians have directly addressed the question of the nature of Australian society as a social structure - that is, its economic, social, and political organisations and relationships - they have been doing what we should properly call “structural history”. Some nineteenth century political economists, such as Wakefield and Marx, were cognizant of the necessity of analysing these complex relationships. Modern individualist historians, however, concentrate on events and individual and small-group

74 Economic History

actions colligated into series and patterns and try to explain them without reference to real social relational structures and continuities. Neo-classical economic historians do examine the economy as a behavioural system but their system has no reality apart from its constituent behavioural patterns and they abstract it from the wider social and ideological totality.

I think the explanations of the economic approaches are defective because of their lack of attention to structural reality and human structuring processes. I do not mean that they should not analyse and explain individual actions and events or patterns and aggregates of behaviour, or use theories, all of which are necessary to enquiry, but rather that such enquiries should be situated within a framework that sees macro-social structural change as the result and ultimate causal context of social phenomena of all kinds and therefore the fundamental problem to be explained. That is, by abstracting the economy and ignoring questions about the social nature of economic relations and the psychological, ideological, and cultllral motivation for economic activity the economists ignore the real causes of economic change. In fact, I would go so far as to say that their “explanations” often remain on the level of description of statistical correlations rather than causal explanation because the red causes remain unexplored.

The task for alZ historians should be to explain structural change. This is essentially because the phenomena of the social world (Like those of nature) are explicable only by reference to the general causal structure of the social world. This causal social structure inheres in the world as the powers and propensities of people and social organisations to interlink causally in definite ways and to behave in definite ways. While social phenomena (that is. actions, events, and behavioural patterns) are caused by a combination of social structures, psychological propensities, personal powers, and intentions, and so are ultimately explicable by them, those causes do result in complex and often baffling phenomena and are themselves complex and baffling. Social and personal causes and phenomena are not an immediate and simple guide to each other. That is, the two levels of social reaIity can be out of phase with each other. Furthermore, non-phenomenal propensities, powers, and intentions can exist but be inactivated - they remain as potentials only and do not have to be exercised to exist.

While human behaviour is systematic and structured it is also intentional. Intentionality does make an important difference to explanations in the human and social studies compared with natural science. But intentions do not completely override social and psychological causality and, indeed, the precise relationships between actions, statements of reasons for actions, intentions, and social and psychological imperatives to action are difficult to establish. Most realists argue that social structures (as systems or networks of relations, meanings, rules, roles, and positions) have an existence relatively independent of human individuals and exert a conditioning and constraining power over individual and collective action and thought. Social structures therefore warrant study for their intrinsic nature and history. But of course they have a triangular symbiotic relationship with action and thought, while not being reducible to either of them. The history of structures is the intended and unintended product of collective thought and action over time, just as individual and collective thought and action are the result of a combination of structural imperatives and constraints, intentions, and accidents. Structures therefore must be studied in terms of the observable thought and action in which they are instantiated. The observable level gives us access, via theory, to the unobservable. Theoretical mediation is essential because, as I have pointed out, the observable is not an immediate guide to the unobservable.

Christoper Lloyd 7s

Therefore, a structuralist and realist criticism of explanation basically claims that individualism is flawed in its fundamental ontological and epistemological commitments and thus is seriously weakened in its attempt to explain its chosen phenomena In practical terms this means that if at bottom the explanations that historians uy to make of economic growth and development rest on foundations consisting of structuralist and realist concepts of social reality they are better able to incorporate theories about the institutional, social, and psychological structures and dynamics of economies. Economic growth is then rendered both less mysterious but also more complicated and varied, which are indeed chief characteristics of human societies through history. Simplification has its benefits for science but it must not be allowed to obscure the complexities and varieties of human arrangements.

IV

Economic historians whatever their methodology have always been closely interested in Australian national economic policy as a part of their central concerns. They Seem to have had disproportionally more influence over policy-making than other kinds of historians. There is, of course, difficulty in gauging the national influence that any intellectual group commands and in Australia it is the received wisdom that intellectuals command less influence than elsewhere in the industrial world. I believe this to be a false “wisdom”. One body of evidence against it is the role played by economists and economic historians.36 The influence of general historians has probably grown in recent years with the growth of national consciousness and their role is felt mainly in the sense of cultural awareness. In contrast, the influence of economic historians has come about in several quite different ways.

Firstly, it has come about through the official posts some of them have held as senior public servants and as govemment ministers or advisers, as evidenced by, for example, the work and careers of Timothy Coghlan, Colin Clark, W. K. Hancock, J. F. Cairns, and N. G. Butlin, among others. They have all played roles in formulating, influencing, and/or implementing government policies, either indirectly through their advice being sought or directly through the positions they have held.

Secondly, it has come through the public comments and criticisms they have often freely given on economic questions. These have sometimes been of an oppositional, left-wing kind, and in that case they have probably not been incorporated into government policy because of the predominantly conservative character of Australian governments. But when the criticisms have been from within the “governing orthodoxy” they have probably had a positive influence. This is largely due to the following consideration.

A third and perhaps most important avenue for influence is within the economics profession, both in the training of students and the setting of agendas on research and policy questions. There are now economic historians in most Australian economics and commerce faculties, either in separate departments or in designated posts within economics departments. They have always been closely associated with economics but, crucially, not part of it. This interstitial existence, which contrasts with North America and Britain where they have been subsumed by Economics or History, has allowed them to flourish institutionally in the last fifteen to twenty years, providing a vital input into the tmining of economists as well as historians. Many economics graduates these days have at least been exposed to economic history. The numbers of students studying economic

76 Economic History

history has grown faster than most other academic disciplines during the past two decades, leading in some cases to a crisis of resources.

One of the results of this development has been that many academic economists in universities (especially younger ones) have become partly educated in economic history. Indeed, some economists (but still a small minority) have become in effect economic historians as they have come to see the value of adopting a long-run, historical viewpoint on the present. The aforementioned books edited by Maddock and McLean, Gregory and Butlin, and Chapman, all testify to this growing awareness because most of the contributors hold positions as economists. This shows that the distinction between applied economics, of neo-classical and institutionalist kinds. on one hand, and economic history of the same methodological and theoretical kinds, on the other, is breaking down in some places. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Australian National University, from where all these books originate. This is significant because not only is that university a centre of world excellence in orthodox economics but it is very influential in Australian government policy and administrative circles. There are close connections between ANU economics departments and centres and such institutions as the Treasury, Deparfment of Finance, Industry Commission, Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Reserve Bank.

The economics profession in Australia (as in most other countries) is dominated by neo-classicism with its emphasis upon deductive model-building, individual market rationality, and relative ignorance of political, social, cultural, and historical perspectives. This means that the influence of economics is intellectually one-dimensional. which I believe has had important deleterious consequences for Australian economic and social policy. Government advice from individual economists and from the above-mentioned institutions is now almost all of this narrow, “economic rationalist” or laissez-faire kind. Neo-classical economics is the ideology of the age and in Australia and elsewhere it has forced the subordination to short-horizon economic reasoning of questions and perspectives about social relations and culture and their evolution. This is reflected in the kinds of economic history that the economics profession has often sanctioned as acceptable to it. The sociological, political, and some forms of institutional approaches have been denigrated and marginalised, to the cost of economic and social explanatory power.

In general, then, the influence economic history has springs largely from the closeness of its association with, but separation from, the economics discipline. This has depended in turn on its methodological and theoretical presuppositions. Economic thought in general has played a more powerful role in Australian life compared with other kinds of thinking and compared with the situation in many other industrial countries. Australian culture, history, and government is probably more materially, hence economistically, oriented than almost anywhere else in the world and therefore an interest in economics (however untutored) can be seen as a part of the national culture. Economic historians have acted to some extent as the conscience of the economics profession because of their interest in long-run change and problems of the real economy, which (it is not sufficiently understood) should form the framework for all economic theory and analyses.

But unfortunately, I believe, the kind of economic history that has flourished recently has been too methodologically and theoretically subservient to deductive and individualist economic reasoning. Insofar as many Australian economic historians are now beginning to adopt longer-run and comparative perspectives these can only help to broaden and enrich their explanations and perhaps gradually subvert the narrowness of economists.

Christoper Lloyd 77

The growing disenchantment with economic reasoning in the wider intellectual community can perhaps be ameliorated if economic historians are able to inject more politically, socially, culturally, and temporally attuned, perspectives into it, which they are beginning to do in a few places.

Concern with short-run material gain now dominates much official thought in Australia about education and other social goods, and alternative modes of thought have increasingly been marginalised. Current government and business policy seems to be aimed at excluding everything that cannot be made to produce profits tomorrow. Economic historians now more than ever have a crucial role to play as Australia is precariously perched on an epochal “hinge” of history, in Boris Schedvin’s phrase.37 This hinge is not just economic but social, political, cultural, and ecological too, so historians of all kinds must be allowed to bring to bear their wisdom gained from an understanding of the complexity of the long-run processes that have produced the present.

NOTES

1

2

In this chapter I am discussing only writing about Australia, not all the writing done on all topics in Australia by economic historians. Historiography has been practised widely in Australia as a branch of the history of ideas. Unfortunately, it is a genre without any well established theories or methodologies but those it has hitherto exhibited seem largely inadequate for the task of criticism. Such studies usually have had one or both of two aims. The first is to give a chronological account of history writing, showing how it has grown in volume and institutionalisdon. The second is to discuss the subject matters dealt with by historians and, sometimes, the related questions of their politico-moral outlook - i.e. their value biases and their vaguely developed “theories” of historical change. What has rarely until recently been treated, and then often unsatisfactorily, is the philosophical and methodological presuppositions of an ontological and epistemological kind that infuse the works of Australian historians and help determine their explanations. A more or less complete list of all historiographical essays would be very large, but the following is a sample: R. M. Crawfad, “History”, in A. G. Price, ed., The Humanities in Australia (Sydney, 1959); R. M. Crawford, M. Clark, and G. Blainey, Making History (Melbourne, 1985); D. Denoon, “The Isolation of Australian History”, Historical Studies 87 (1986); H. Heaton, “The Progress of Historical Studies in Australia”, Journal of Modern History 15, 4 (1953); J. A. LaNauze, “The Study of Australian History, 1929-1959”, Historical Studies 33 (1959); S . Macintyre, “Radical History and Bourgeois Hegemony”, Interventim 2 (1972); S . Macintyre, “The Writing of Australian History”, in D. H. Bortchardt and V. Crittenden, eds, Australians: A Guide to Sources (Sydney, 1987); K. MacKirdy, “Australia”, in R. Winks, ed., The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth (Durham, N.C.. 1966); R. Pascoe. The Manufacture of Australian History (Melbourne, 1979); G . Shaw, “The Discipline of the State: Writing Australian History Since 1819”, Current Affdrs Bulletin 60, 4 (1983); J. M. Ward, “Ifstoriography”, in A. L McCleod, ed., The Pattern of Australian Culture (Oxford, 1963); J. M. Ward, “Reflecting on Australian History and Historians”, in G. Dufty, G. Harman, and K. Swan. eds, Historians at Work (Sydney, 1973). The explanatory foundations of economic history writing have been more critically examined than those of general history. See, for example: W. A. Sinclair, “Re-Writing Our History”, Dissent (Spring, 1963); B. Fitzpatrick and W. A. Sinclair, “Australian History”, Dissent (Summer, 1963); B. FirzpaIrick, “Counter Revolution in Australian Historiography”, Meunjin 22 (1963); K. Rowley, “Sinclair’s Bankrupt History”, Intervention 9 (1977); G .

78 Economic History

3

4

5

6

7

8 9

10 11

12 13

14

15

16 17 18 19

20

21

Snooks, ‘‘orthodox and Radical Interpretations of the Development of Australian History”, T. Rows, “Facts, Theories, and Ideology: A Comment on Graenie Snooks”, and G. Snooks, “The Radical View of Australian Capitalism: A Reply”, all in Labour History 28 (1975); D. Clark, “Marx Versus Butlin: Some Comments on the Snooks-Rowse Debate”, Labour Ilktory 30 (1976); B. McFarlane, ‘The Use of Theory in llistory: Snooks Snookered”, Labour History 31 (1976); G. Snooks, “Max and Australian Economic History: A Critique of a Debate”, Flinders University Working Papers in Economic History 5 (1983); C. B. Schedvin, “Midas and the Merino: A Perspective on Australian Economic Historiography”, Economic History Review 32, 4 (1979); W. A. Sinclair, “Econonlic History”, in Bortchardt and Crittenden, Australians: A Guide to Sources. nie relevance to historical explanation of philosophy of social science is discussed in C. Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (Oxford, 1986). “Realism, Structurism, and History: Foundations for a Transformative Science of Society”, Theory a id Society 18 (1989), and ?he Structures of Hktory (Oxford, 1993). W. C. Wentworth, Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settleme& in Van Diemen‘s LNld (London, 1819). J. T. Bigge, Reports of the CommiFsioner of Enquiry: Into the State of the Colony of N e w South Wales, On the Judicial &tabfishmen& of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, and On The State of Agriculture and Trade in The Colony of New South Wales (British Parliamentary Papers, London, 1822-3). E. G. Wakefield, A Letter From Sydney The Principal Town of Australasia (London, 1829) republished in F. F. L. Prichard, ed., ‘The Collected Works of Edward Gibbon Wakejield (Glasgow, 19G8). See the discussions of this literature in A. G. L. Shaw, ed., Great Britain and the Colonies, 1815-1865 (London, 1970) and D. Winch, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (London, 1965). K. Marx, Capifal, Volume One (London, Penguin Edition, 1976). p. 933. As I have already indicated, histories of economic matters had becn written well before this but always as a part of a wider political and even moral discourse and often with a guiding focus upon administrative policy. While the concern with policy h u never been lost, the wider concerns have been dropped by many modem writers. Indeed, the s u p p e d disinterestedness and objectivity of scientific enquiry is one of the hallmarks of modernism. This modernism manifests itself in economics and economic history partly as a concern with quantification. Hence the earliest modern economic historiaiw were sometimes amateur or professional statisticians as in the case of T. A. Coghlan, the NSW statistician from 1886, who was really the founder of modem Australian economic historical enquiry. His annual yearbooks from 1887 on The Wealth and Progress of New South Wales and from 1890 on all seven Australasian colonies, are recognisably works of economic history. ’Ihese books were the foundations of his great work on Labour and lndustry in Australia of 1918. For a history of statistics and, by implication, of sonie aspccts of early economic history writing, see C. Forster and C. Hazlehurst, “Australian Statisticians and llie Development of Official Statistics”, in Australian Bureau of Statistics, Yearbook of Australia 1988 (Canberra, 1988). For excellent discussions of economic literature and including some on economic history see C. D. W. Goodwin, Economic Enquily in Australia (Durham, N.C., 1966) and P. Groenewegen and B. McFarlane, A History ofAustralian Economic Thought (Sydney, 1990). T. A. Coghlan, Lubour and Indusrry in Australia, Four Volumes (Oxford, 19 18). On Coghlan see S. T. Holton, “T. A. Coghlan’s Labour and Industry in Australia: ,411 Enigma in Australian Historiography”, Hktorical Studies 88 (1987); and M. Haig-Muir, T. A. Cogtilan: From Statistics to Economic History, unpublished paper, Economic History Society Conference (Canberra, 1988). E. 0. G. Shann, An Econom’c Ilistory of Australia (Cambridge, 1930). B. Fitqatrick, British Imperialism and Australia. 1788-1833 (London, 1939) and The British Empire in Australia 1834-1939 (Melbourne, 1941). Among Blainey’s numerous works, see especially, A Land IIalf Won (Melbourne, 1980); Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Ancient Australia (Melbourne, 1975); The Tyranny of Distance: I I o w Distance Shaped Australia‘s History (Melbourne, 1966); The Rush That Never Ended: A IIistory of Australian Mining (Melbourne, 1963); Steel Master: A Life of Essington Lewis (Melbourne, 1971). On the origins and history of “new” economic history see D. N. McCloskey, “The Achievements of the Cliometric School”, Joumal of Economic History 38, 1 (1978); and Econometric Ifistory (London, 1987); and R. W. Fogel, “Historiography and Retrospective Econometrics”, History and Theory 3, 1 (1970). N. G. Butlin, Investment in Australian Econom‘c Development, 1860-1900 (Cambridge, 1964). E. A. Boehm, Twentieth Century Ecomnuc Development in Australia (Melbourne, 1971,3rd ed., 1993). W. A. Sinclair, The Process of Economic Developnwnt in Australia (Melbourne, 1976). R. Maddock and 1. W. McLean, eds, The Australian Economy in the Long Run (Cambridge. 1987); R. G. Gregory and N. G. Butlin, eds, Recovery From the Depression: Australia and the World Economy in the 1930s (Cambridge, 1988); B. Chapman, ed., Australian Economic Growth (Melbourne, 1989). See the discussion of radical nationalism by Ian Turner in “Australian Nationalism and Australian History”, Joumal of Australian Studies 4 (1979). See M. Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), and The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, 1982); D. C. North, Structure and Change in Economic Ilistory (New York, 1981) and with R. P. Thomas, The Rise and Fall ofthc Western World (Cambridge, 1973).

Christoper Lloyd 79

22

23 24

2s 26 27

28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36

37

M. Olson, “Australia in the Perspedive of the Rise and Decline of Nations”, Australian Economic Review 67 (1984). C. B. Schedvin, Aurtralia in the Great Depression (Sydney, 1970). N. G. Butlin, A. Barnard, J. J. Pincus, Government and Capitalism: Public and Private Choice in Twentieth Century Australia (Sydney, 1982); N. G. Butlin, “Trends in PubliOrivate Relations, 1901-1975” in B. Head, ed., S#e and Economy in Australia (Melbourne, 1983). and “Streuon on Politics and Modern Conservatism”, Memjin 46.2 (1987). R. W. Connell and T. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History (Melbourne, 1980). P. McMichael, Settlers and the Agrarirm Question (Cambridge, 1984). K. Buckley and E. L. Wheelwright, No Paradise for Workers: Capitalism and the Common People in Australia, 1788-1914 (Melbourne, 1988). Connell and Irving, Class Structure, p. xi. Ibid., p. 3. McMichael, Settlers, p. xv. D. &noon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemirphere (Oxford, 1983). See, f a example, D. W. Meinig, On The Margins of the Good Earth: The South Aurtralian What Frontier, 1869-1884 (Chicago, 1962); A. G . Price, The Western Invasions of the Pacific mtd its Conthents (Oxford, 1963); D. N. Jeans, An Historical Geography of New South Wales to 1901 (Sydney, 1972); J. M. Powell, Environmental Management in Australia, 1788-1914 (Melbourne, 1976); J. M. Powell and M. Williams, eds, Australian S p e , Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives (Melbourne, 1975); G. Bdton, Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment, 1788-1980 (Sydney, 1981). There is a good overview in D. N. Jeans, “Historical Geography”, Australian Geographical Studies 26,l (1988). 0. H. K. Spate, Ihe Pac& Since Magellan, Three Volumes (Canberra, 1979-1988). J. M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Aurtralia: The Restive Fringe (Camkidge, 1988). These six concepts have been elucidated in my “Realism and Structurism in Historical Theay”, History and Theory 28.3 (1989). There seem yet to be no good discussion of the political, economic, and social influence of economic historians and economists in Australia. The history of the economics and economic history disciplines and professions has been discussed in Goodwin, Economic Enquiry in Australia; N. G. Butlin, “Economic Enquiry in Australia” (a review of Goodwin), Australian Eccmomic History Review I. 2 (1967); C. B. Schedvin, “Economic History in Australian Universities”, Australian Eco~mic History Review I. 1 (1%7); N. G. Butlin ‘The Public Sector and the Economics Profession, 191&1987”, in D. Pope and L Alston, eds, Australia’s Greatest Asset: Human Resources in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Sydney, 1989); P. Groenewegen, “The Development of Economics in Australia: A Tale of Two Centuries”, Econom‘c Papers 18, 1 (1989); Groenewegen and McFarlane, A History of Australian Economic Thought; G. D. Snooks, “It’s Time to Take Time into Acmunt: Economic History in the 199Q and Beyond”, ANU Working Papers in Economic History No. 143 (Canberra, 1990), and “The Lost Dimension: Economics Without Time”, ANU Working Papers in Economic History No. 155 (Canberra, 1991). These last two papers are drawn from Snooks’ Economics Without Time (London, 1993) which I have not seen at the time of writing this chapter. C, B. Schedvin, “The Australian Economy on the Hinge of History”, Australian Economic Review 77 (1987).