Australia developed very quickly in comparison with contemporary British dominions, the Federation launching with provisions for a near-complete welfare state. Whereas the high wages, high tariffs and White Australia consensus persisted until the eighth decade of the 20th century, and the new baseline not established until Howard ratified the Hawke-Keating Accord.
The continent’s settlement had opposed the world’s oldest society with its most enterprising: terra nullius was fairly applied (if regretted). By 1800 emancipist and former officers had made New South Wales self-sufficient in food, but marine products remained the principal export until the development of merino wool. 19th-century Aussie colonies were readily granted self-government, as in Canada Colonial NSW busied itself with land policy, immigration, and education. Frontier conflict, largely dormant until midcentury, sharpened with expanding agriculture and livestock and missionary activity (Anglicans being a less temperate influence than elsewhere in the empire). 1846’s revised leaseholding law converted Squatters from agitators to defenders of status quo.
In 1849, colonial legislatures were authorized to modify their own constitutions and unlike 20th century Africa, they quickly grew into the role, the author approving of such Chartist features as no property qualification, equalized voting districts, votes for women, and pay for MPs. Contrary to affinities for Ned Kelly and bushranging (or at least goldmining, sheep shearing, and droving), 35% of the population lived in the main cities (25% in Sydney or Melbourne), generally in crowded, poor conditions. Save for foreign policy and defense, they were largely independent. Governments grew up not by application of logic but common sense: Australia’s conservative bent was due not to British influence but legislative elites’ mistrust of democracy. Victoria was unsurprisingly less prepared for growth than NSW – 15 years after its founding Melbourne’s population of 140,000 was greater than Sydney not to mention Bristol, England, or Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1860, there were 1 million acres under crop, by 1900 7.5 million.
Inter-colonial agreement had been possible since Lord Grey floated the idea of union in 1848 but the first generations of responsible government had been more interested in practical matters. So the tariff was the main issue of the first Federation conference in 1891, along with the nature of the upper house. The Canadian model seemed most relevant, as the Westminster tradition was unwritten, and the US seen compromised by civil war / racism. (Meanwhile, because of current account surplus, Aussie debt per capital was £50 versus £12 in Canada.) The Federation charter was remarkable for anticipating (in section 51) the welfare state: government was given powers to resolve industrial disputes and to provide for old-age and widows’ pensions, maternity allowances, unemployment, medicines, and medical and dental treatment. Organized labor had not been part of its drafting, yet Australia was soon known as a workman’s paradise.
As nascent industries and labor wanted protection, while primary producers and conservative allies sought access to English markets, the matter was resolved by ‘imperial preference’, three-quarters of imports originating in the empire. Support for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was unanimous, led by Labor and Queensland; it was not abandoned until 1966 (under Holt) and renounced in 1991 (by Hawke). Modern wage awards lasted still longer, as employers demanded tariff protection in return. Recessions naturally led to decreased wages and inevitably to labor unrest.
The author’s portrayal of the postwar era is conventional and less obviously triumphant yet more balanced than, for example, Macintyre. Where there was ‘a hint of Northern Ireland’ in prewar Australia – politics refracting religion (Labor = Catholic, Liberal = Protestant, characterizing wide swaths of society and government) – with the influx of Italians, discrimination against working-class Catholics diminished and stereotypes broke down. By 1970, multiculturalism was established in Sydney and Melbourne, the country towns remaining Anglo-Irish. Australia’s role in Vietnam left fewer scars than in the US. Menzies predominated; Whitlam shook Labor from its party centralization; Fraser’s Liberals struggled to articulate a positive program, as so often with statist conservatives. The Hawke-Keating Accord – trade-union wage restraint in exchange for controlling inflation and job creation plus award reform – broke the postwar prototype; Howard honored its resolution while also surmounting the problems of Mabo and Wik, the latter imperiling 70 percent of Australian land title. Republicanism doesn’t address the country’s ongoing racial animosities.
Often usefully comparative; largely celebratory though seeming regretful of racism by book’s end. Excellent maps.
Economic development
5. Johnson, Modern Times (2006)
A tour of the principal socioeconomic, intellectual, and political events and trends of the 20th century through the 1980s. Key observations: political violence is infectious and degenerative in nature; it is highly important for leaders to be seen as moral and ethical. In the last century, the left was responsible for the bulk of the disastrous experiments with social engineering in Russia, China, and various socialist outposts, but the right also participated as in Germany, Italy, and Spain. The author convincingly points to the enduring role of individual agency as well as the law of unintended effects. Because he is not a professional academic and is conservative, he is considered idiosyncratic but his conclusions have never been refuted.
4. Wickham, Inheritance of Rome (14 Apr 2019)
Assesses socioeconomic trends in formerly imperial Roman lands over 400 – 1000 AD, describing the collapse as tectonic but not catastrophic: culture especially displayed continuity and evolution if simplification.
The era’s most important event was the Empire’s breakup at the hands of the Vandals in 439, severing Rome’s food supply (i.e., grain and oil), followed toward century’s end by Gaul’s defection to the barbarian powers. These restricted trade, simplified wealth to land ownership, and restricted government (fisc, justice, administration). By 650 every successor kingdom had its own traditions. Islam’s rise further severed Rome from the Byzantine world (which for a time retained control of the Nile valley), completing the end of the Mediterranean regime and prompting two centuries of ferment. Taxation, shifting from commerce toward land, closed off the possibility of successors to Rome, prompting elites to favor military pursuits over luxury.
Roman culture emphasized great cities, which decayed. Medieval Christianity, by contrast, was not subsumed in Roman values: its structures changed the least, its critique of society and government persisted. Secular education gave way to religious inspiration.
Wickham organizes around the Roman West, the rising Islamic sphere, and Byzantium, and emphasizes archaeology, for example the dispersion of clay pots indicating trade, as free of ‘assumed narrative’ found in manuscripts and such traditional evidence.
In the European Common Era, the period 500-800 marks the greatest local autonomy, the least centralization. Population was sparse but not disorderly. There was little inter-regional trade, Francia being more active than its contemporaries (along the Rhine and the Meuse to the North Sea) and Britain less so: wealth maps accordingly. Most housing reverted to wood (until 1200); elites moved into towers as visually claim to leadership and status, the visual (and the miraculous) being more powerful than written word. Gaul and Germany formed under Merovingian customs over the 6th to 8th centuries, though not too far prior to Charles Martel’s ascendance. Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy elaborated differently, the Spanish retaining greater cohesion until the Islamic conquest and the Italians fracturing entirely. Only the Franks sought empire, only the Spanish Visigoths retained imperial government. All militarized, all lost sophisticated taxation. Court-centered aristocracies persisted, of Roman stock but post-Roman custom. (English and Irish social structures congealed more easily under Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic patterns, the exception being Catholic influence). Though also disrupted, the Church retained its institutional shape – almost one-third of land in France and Italy was church-owned. To varying degrees, bishops (who tended to be aristocrats) held local sway. Literacy declined less than once supposed – government was still based on written instruction – but society’s elites militarized and much land was needed to feed and clothe armies. Europe’s early medieval ages have been seen as Germanic but though societies indeed localized, Wickham holds post-Roman sociocultural practices didn’t change much after 750 and the greater change was militarization. Reduced distribution of wealth (land) determined what the peasantry could and could no longer do. Under the Merovingians, for example, court was most important; some peasants were free, some were serfs, checking broader class solidarity; women were less present publicly than in Rome.
The Byzantine empire separated from Rome over 609-642, being unable to hold back Islamic (Persian) attacks and so losing the productive wealth of Egypt; Constantinople depopulated from 500,000 to ~ 50,000 residents, a much faster decline than Rome two centuries earlier. Byzantines survived by turning to the state.
Development in the Islamic lands is generally presented as contrasting with the West and Byzantium, rather than in terms of theology. From 630, Arabs sought to remain separate from the lands they conquered; to be on the military payroll was a badge of honor. Consequently Persian and Roman society did not blend. Beginning with late 8th-century Umayyads, administration shifted to viziers and the center of Islamic government commenced a continuous line of caliphs running to the early 16th century. In the 9th century, Baghdad became the cultural center of Islam, led by a community of scholars premised on ulama. (But: the 9th century also saw the Sunni-Shia split.). There were four main schools of law ranging from legal reasoning (interpretation) of caliphal legislation to hadith (premised on Mohammed’s statements). By 900 the latter prevailed – the ‘closing of the gate’ – no new laws promulgated by the caliph or anyone else was considered fixed. Land did not equate to power in medieval Islam, only position within the state, which brought tax wealth. Paradoxically, the succeeding Abbasid empire fell because the state grew too large.
Both Muslims and Byzantines were concerned with representation – what is holy, what is idolatrous. Aversion to the visual was a factor in the Roman-Byzantine schism of 843 (the popes long since having identified as Roman). Both Byzantine and Arab commerce were closely tied to the state: private wealth gave access to the state, which led to more complex ways to accumulate and recycle wealth.
The Byzantine city-state, which saw declining trade over the 7-8th centuries, recovered in the 11th-12 centuries notwithstanding the coming Arab conquest. By the 10th century, the second great Mediterranean trade cycle, including in the following century the Italian ports as well as the Crusade-fueled trade, was underway. But intra-regional trade among Europe, Islam, and Byzantium did not recover.
After 800 the West saw the introduction of moral political practice, exemplified by the Carolingians: the church and state working together. Yet by the period’s end, Carolingian public structures had failed, replaced by the rise of aristocratic power, the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere (somewhat analogous to the collapse of the caliphate), and the eventual rise of European kingdoms. Charlemagne matches Justinian in advancing basic literacy, religion, socially minded legislation, and participation in assemblies. He patronized scholars but the sociopolitical world of 6-8th centuries pertained into the 9th – a time that matched the French Revolution as a hotbed of education invading politics. Carolingian rulers allowed elites to rise according to intellectual ability, for purposes of promoting Christendom (theology), unlike the Byzantines, who favored tax-funded officials and army commanders. Leaders felt it necessary to moralize their decisions; however, Carolingian initiatives reached local societies via public justice not moral reform measures. The Carolingian era was destroyed by the multiplication of successors; these regional hegemons were more important than the overall rise of aristocrats; its decline undermined the pope’s international stature.
Culturally, Carolingians evidenced the dynamic of kings choosing bishops and bishops correcting kings; Byzantines relied on Roman tradition for assurance; the Abbasids looked to the now-defined ulama. As in Byzantium, in Islam education trained one for statecraft. Solidity came from tax (which was absent in the west), but religion of the elite was not seen to be essential to state survival or that the task of the state to provide for communal salvation. Frankish aristocrats after the Carolingians were less likely to be literate; the church upheld ‘international’ culture.
In the Viking era, southern England suffered no permanent regional breakdown before 1066. Only Dublin and Normandy, plus north Scotland and Ireland, survived as Viking political retains. The rest of Danish settlements were soon culturally absorbed. Aristocratic dominance based on property was more pronounced than the continent; yet the king maintained more political control. Arguably the main political creation was the catalytic of unifying England.
Russia exhibited Byzantine influences, but was too far from Islam, and so developed of internal dynamics. Spain’s government stems from the Visigoths not Francia or Al-Andalus. Sociopolitical systems in ‘ouher Europe’, notwithstanding this diversity, stemmed from solidifying aristocratic power as well as borrowing government mechanisms from neighbors, for example specialized royal officials, top-down judiciary, or military service owed the state. In 400, stable systems stopped at the Rhine-Danube border; by 1000 recognizable polities were evident west of the Volga, albeit in weaker forms than during the Roman era.
Institutional politics were most effective where there was a strong tax (e.g., Rome, Islam, Byzantium), and less secure if dependent on land grants to aristocrats since the metropole was likely to run out of land. The decline of public culture, which was the strongest remaining link to Rome), for example in law, often devolved to private rule (e.g., inside private castles). The land tax which underpinned the Roman fisc continued in simplified form, hurting the peasantry (as well as intraregional trade) since it was not distributed. The 10th century was often like the 9th yet saw substantial changes in public assemblies.
The decline of the peasantry, ‘encaged’ in castles, figures prominently in Wickham’s writing. During the Carolingian and succeeding eras, aristocrats consolidated land ownership though peasants did not. But inheritance became normal only post 1000 (in Francia, post 900), which cramped monarchies. Private castles were a 10th century development, tying aristocrats to regional more than political interests, and leading to division among those who fight, those who work – the so-called feudal revolution. Feudal seignory is not a Carolingian structure writ small but a structural change; but not all aristocrats left court to rule local regions. Peasants in the 9-10th centuries were slowly excluded from the public sphere. Carolingian political economy promoted the demesne, ‘encaging’ the lower classes on the estate: they were dependent on the lords for land to farm and live. By the time they re-emerged after 1000, the Middle Ages were effectively over: villages were spheres of public power, estates of private rule.
The key major trends (shifts) of the era from 400-1000 by chronology are:
1. The breakup of the Roman Empire, which was more economic and fiscal than culture, aided by the rise of Islam severing Rome from the Byzantine world and fueling two centuries of crisis. In this time, governmental changes in the Islamic regions were more dramatic even then Carolingian lands.
2. The introduction of moralistic political practices exemplified by the Carolingian project – the church and state working together.
3. The end of the Carolingian empire’s public structures circa 1000, most obviously demonstrated by the rise of aristocratic power and the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere. A somewhat analogous trend is evident in the breakup of the Caliphate. In northern Europe, modern kingdoms emerged.
4. Wealth was accumulated via land ownership, and land could be effectively taxed. The peasants suffered, regional exchange increased.
5. Institutionalized politics were most effective if there was strong tax revenue, and less so if the government was dependent on land grants to aristocrats.
6. The development of public culture with the strongest links to Rome was law; the decline to private rule on the estates (in French castles) illustrates the point.
Of note: French historiography has predominated the later Medieval ages, but the Frankish experience was not typical of Europe.
3. Kamen, Spain 1492-1763 (26 Feb 2012)
Surveys Spain’s imperial era from the consolidation of Castilian power to the end of Anglo-French warfare. Not military conquest but adventurers, cooperative provincial elites, and Latin American coin fueled the global structure. Italy (Spanish Lombardy, based in Milan) provided crucial banking, armaments, and manpower. Spanish never became lingua franca; despite the civilizing mission of Catholicism, Castile’s elites remained intellectually and culturally insulated; and Europe did not look up to the peninsula. Power crested in 1635 and turned to France, which ‘took over’ in 1702 upon a Bourbon succeeding a Habsburg on the Spanish throne (prompting the War of Spanish Succession). Little interested in narrative politics and more attracted to sociocultural phenomena, the learned book grows dull in sections that dwell on Filipino and Ibero-American anthropology.
5. Brand, American Colossus (8 May 2012)
Surveys postbellum political economy, concluding capitalism outstripped democracy to the benefit of a few and disadvantage of many. Federal power was used to spur the development of railroads, settlement of the West (including Indian pacification), the growth of cities over agriculture, foreign trade (via tariff), and a national currency. The almost inevitable result was a series of financial crises (especially 1873 and 1895), the latter requiring the intervention of JP Morgan. Other titans such as Rockefeller and Carnegie lacked the influence on government (or fail to illustrate the thesis); incidents such as the Homestead riot or the Molly Maguires also are case in theme. Erudite and readable, the book nonetheless feels a bit freighted with ideology: it is not clear ‘capitalism’ triumphed at the expense of a still-burgeoning democracy. Indeed, by the first decade of the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt embodied the rise of progressivism; the economy failed again in 1907 and then 1929; and what a murderous time was the century of communism and progressivism.
11. Thiel, Zero to One (15 Oct 2014)
A highly stylized theory of entrepreneurialism which contends startups aiming to solve clear, ‘big’ problems are most likely to transform the future. The author posits the ideology of competition is a false objective for businesses, which should instead seek to become monopolies. In Silicon Valley, this usually requires proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and distinct branding. Along the way, the founder of Paypal-turned-financier outlines some practical advice (e.g., equity for employees) and also libertarian political thought: faith in indefinite progress leads to pursuit of rent, whereas faith in definite progress leads to inventions that transform the future – careers in law or finance versus going to the moon. The jumping off point, the question of singularity (i.e., exponential advance), is worth further pursuit. Interesting but lacking in the economic grounding that appears early in the book, and may grow dated.
5. Blainey, A Shorter History of Australia (10 Feb 2015)
Geography and economics have been more important to Australian history than politics. The ‘tyranny of distance’ shows itself in Aboriginal culture, Western settlement and economic development, foreign relations, and so on. They have often been interrelated, as in the development of export products (notably wool and mining) or the influence of drought. Owing to scarcity of labor, working conditions and labor law have been advanced, leading to egalitarianism (equality of outcomes) and also devotion to sport (as outside leisure). Black-white relations, obviously one-sided and sometimes fraught, are not more significant than the latter 20th-century influx of Asian peoples, which supplemented steadily decreasing European migration. Crisply written.
7. Sen, The Argumentative Indian (6 Mar 2015)
Essays by the noted political economist collectively arguing for the importance of Indian heterogeneity, particularly as regards history and religion. The author considers Indian views of themselves and others, ways of reasoning, and such ‘real world’ issues as poverty, class and sex, nuclear weaponry, etc. The title refers to the subcontinent’s pluralistic sociocultural traditions. However, the book fails to grapple with the violence of partition: why should it be ascribed to the British? Rabindranath Tagore figures prominently, and appears worthy of future exploration. At times self-referential and repetitive, the book is nonetheless a useful introduction to Indian sociopolitical thought.
23. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (18 Nov 2022)
Politics shaped England’s socioeconomic development over 1530-1780, as the island nation alone in Europe progressed from monarchy-and-aristocracy toward the proto-bourgeois, from agricultural toward commercial and early industrial.
In the Tudor era, the Commons gained influence; in the Reformation, absolutism was undermined by conscience and education of the gentry. London’s economic power acted to unify England (if not the soon-to-be United Kingdom). Domestic policy aimed at controlling the peasantry via justices of the peace. Foreign policy, which began in medieval thrall to Rome and Spain, grew to be independent (though the country remained a 2d-line power).
1640’s destruction of the Stuart bureaucracy was the most decisive event in British history. The dynasty’s unsustainable economics – spending more than it received – led to the Civil War (see also 18th-century France). But predictable causes do not guarantee predictable outcomes: nonconforming religion (e.g., Lollards) as well as the new urban culture evinced popular opposition. When the conflict came, richer peasants aligned not with the lumpen but the gentry, which had learned to lead in the schools.
During the Interregnum and Restoration, the abolition of northern and Welsh councils unified the legal system and the economic dominance of London gathered pace, acting to radiate Puritanism. But the Restoration’s key feature was anti-democratic. Aristocrats and bishops returned; nonconformists were excluded by the Clarendon Code; enclosure accelerated, promoting agricultural productivity. In this respect, Jacobitism was an outcome not a cause: unimproving, gentry and freeholders were liquidated; the ‘new men’ were ascendant before 1745. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 marked the transition to national monopoly (i.e., to colonial mercantilism from chartered companies) and the Dutch wars. Then joint stock companies deployed capital where previously it had been in limited supply. (Ireland, after African slaves, was the principal victim of this trend.) The Restoration did not halt labor migration but favored employers. Excise and land taxes acted to shift resources from peasants to landowners and the City. Following the Toleration Act, Quakers and others saw to it that favorable legislation was enforced across England, again promoting more uniform administration and tempering the influence of JPs. Intellectually, the Newtonian revolution as well as dispersion of ‘natural hierarchy’ undermined views of social organization: men no longer were united to each other.
After the Glorious Revolution and over the 18th century the colonies supplanted Europe as England’s biggest market; 1763’s Peace of Paris converted these markets from suppliers to buyers, until the American revolution and Irish revolt shook the system. Thus there were five periods of export trade: old draperies to 1600; new draperies to 1650; colonial monopoly – entrepot – re-export to 1700; manufactures to the colonies to 1780; and afterward the industrial revolution, enabled by modernized banks and credit, facilitated worldwide export. Bacon’s aspirations for society advanced by scientific approaches advanced dissent. Freeborn men thought to enter the factor was to surrender their birthright; laborers now sought protection for Elizabethan regulations (e.g., prices, standards, apprenticeships, etc.). By 1780, rural distress was evident, though grand landowners had regained ground.
Heavily focused on structural analysis, there is no discussion of even the Whig Ascendancy or George III’s new system. Event are Whiggishly inevitable. The neo-Marxist approach also surrenders credibility in such observations as Soviet collectivization costs ‘thousands’ of lives.
19. Turner, The Frontier in American History (6 Dec 2016)
The American frontier was settled by rough-hewn individuals and families migrating in search of the best free land to homestead, wanting to get away from coastal or regional elites. Settlement typically created a new type of American, as descendants of Puritan New England, Germans from Pennsylvania, and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from the Piedmont South merged together into communities which were helpful to one another, but ultimately individualists who did not much trust government. Jacksonian democracy, with its eponymous hero, was its first political expression. Settlement of the old Northwest and Midwest of the country — roughly, Big 10 country — was the most significant phase as the region first tipped the balance between north and south toward the free soil, then produced the greatest generals and politicians (including Lincoln) of the age, and finally yielded the great resources for America’s industrial rise. Interestingly, the far Great Lakes and upper plains states (eg, Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas) were often heavily peopled by immigrants — Germans and Scandinavians. Free land served as a natural outlet for low-wage earner of the cities. By the time the frontier closed in 1890, the migrants had switched to favoring government intervention to protect individuals from the economic power of consolidating industrialists. Another important outlet was the Midwest’s rise of the state university, to cultivate the talents of the new citizen.