In the 1970s, labor history dominated scholarly practice in Australia. From the 1980s onwards however, an influential group of cultural historians encouraged the profession to move away from the traditional study of class structure to consider discursive forms of power, particularly as they related to gender and race. Building on the subsequent growth of environmental history and settler colonial studies, Australian historians are now participating in the global move to historicize capitalism. This is increasingly making the economic a core agenda of historical practice in Australia, as elsewhere. Current moves to re-integrate economic analyses to Australian cultural and environmental history draws the material and the discursive together in new ways. This is leading to new connections between labor history, economic history, intellectual history, political economics, environmental history and settler-colonial studies. This workshop will draw links between these developments in Australian history and new histories of American capitalism. We will consider what Australian capitalism has to offer the history of capitalism internationally, both in terms of Australia’s unique social, cultural, environmental and economic histories and by comparing Australian and American historiographical trends.

This session on capitalism, knowledge and discourse in Australian History will explore the role of mining corporations in establishing and maintaining popular ideas about conservation, relationships between scientific knowledge, agriculture and capitalism and ideas about money underpinning financial innovations in colonial Australia. During discussion, we will consider the theories and techniques that political economy, environmental history and cultural history bring to our understanding of the relationships between ideas and capitalism in 19th and 20th Century Australian history.

Goals for this session include:

• Explore connections between Australian environmental, intellectual and economic history and new histories of capitalism
• Identify mechanisms and pathways for the production of ideas and discourses that have underpinned capitalist developments in Australia
• Investigate connections and divergences between Australian and American Institutional changes in managing power and inequality in the history of capitalism