The Economics discipline at the University of Adelaide has a distinguished 100 year history of which the University and the State of South Australia can be proud. Very few other departments, of any discipline in Australian universities, could claim to have a majority of its lecturer appointments rising to full Professor status over a period as long as 1901 to 1995. Nor would many other university departments be able to say they have had five of their graduates win Rhodes Scholarships in the past 12 years.

In a time of pandemics, war and climate change, fostering knowledge that transcends disciplinary boundaries is more important than ever. Economic history is one of the world’s oldest interdisciplinary fields, with its prosperity dependent on connection and relevance to disciplinary behemoths economics and history. Australian Economic History is the first history of an interdisciplinary field in Australia, and the first to set the field’s progress within the structures of Australian universities. It highlights the lived experience of doing interdisciplinary research, and how scholars have navigated the opportunities and challenges of this form of knowledge. These lessons are vital for those seeking to develop robust interdisciplinary conversations now and in the future. This previously untold story of economic history in Australia exposes the centrality of economic thought and scholarship to Australian intellectual and political life. Deftly positioning economic history in an innovative institutional, place-based and person-focused narrative, Claire Wright entangles economics with the history of education to produce a tale of university interdisciplinarity, influence and impact. Written with vitality and bursting with both data and anecdote, this book makes an exceptional contribution to the intersecting fields of history, economics and higher education studies. – Hannah Forsyth, author of A History of the Modern Australian University. Few readers would expect to find a classical tragedy in the story of an academic field. Yet that is what Claire Wright shows us in this study of Economic History, as it has been practiced in Australia. She traces the field from legendary beginnings to triumphant growth to organisational collapse - and renaissance on other terms. Carefully researched and vigorously written, this book raises questions about disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, universities and markets, and social bases of intellectual work, that are relevant to all fields today. – Raewyn Connell, author of The Good University Australia proved a pioneer in the study of economic history, nurturing a discipline with innovative data and understanding of material trends. Yet by the 1990s economic history departments closed as senior scholars retired and the field was subsumed by conventional economics. In this absorbing study, Dr Claire Wright challenges the conventional account. She is tough-minded about financial and institutional pressures on the field, but cautiously optimistic about the future. It is a mistake, she argues, to see institutional representation as the benchmark of influence. Instead, the interdisciplinary nature of economic history has encouraged new research and teaching across the humanities and social sciences. With close attention to individual scholars and their university departments, and a deep sense of the trajectory of the field, Australian Economic History: Transformations of an Interdisciplinary Field is an original and important contribution to Australian intellectual history. – Glyn Davis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Global Economic Thought offers the first comprehensive overview of the long-run history of economic thought from a truly international perspective. Although globalization has facilitated the spread of ideas between nations, the history of economics has tended to be studied either thematically (by topic), in terms of different currents of thought, or individually (by economist). Work has been published in the past on the economic thought traditions of specific countries, but this pioneering volume is unique in offering a wide-ranging comparative account of the development of economic ideas and philosophies on the international stage. The volume brings together leading experts on the development of economic ideas from across the world in order to offer a truly international comparison of the economics within nation-states. Each author presents a long-term perspective on economics in their region, allowing global patterns in the progress of economic ideas over time to be identified. The specially commissioned chapters cover the vast sweep of the history of economics across five world regions, including Europe (England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy Greece, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Sweden, Russia and the Ukraine), the Americas (the USA, Canada, Mexico and Central America, Spanish-Speaking South America, Brazil and the Caribbean), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Arab-Islamic Economics, Persia/Iran, North Africa), Africa (West Africa, Southern Africa, Mozambique and Angola), and the Asia-Pacific Region (Australia and New Zealand, China, Southeast Asia, the Asian Tigers, India.) This rigorous, ambitious and highly scholarly volume will be of key interest to students, academics, policy professionals and to interested general readers across the globe.

Volume 19 of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) contains concise biographies of individuals who died between 1991 and 1995. The first of two volumes for the 1990s, it presents a colourful montage of late twentieth-century Australian life, containing the biographies of significant and representative Australians. The volume is still in the shadow of World War II with servicemen and women who enlisted young appearing, but these influences are dimming and there are now increasing numbers of non-white, non-male, non-privileged and non-straight subjects. The 680 individuals recorded in volume 19 of the ADB include Wiradjuri midwife and Ngunnawal Elder Violet Bulger; Aboriginal rights activist, poet, playwright and artist Kevin Gilbert; and Torres Strait Islander community leader and land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo. HIV/AIDS child activists Tony Lovegrove and Eve Van Grafhorst have entries, as does conductor Stuart Challender, ‘the first Australian celebrity to go public’ about his HIV/AIDS condition in 1991. The arts are, as always, well-represented, including writers Frank Hardy, Mary Durack and Nene Gare, actors Frank Thring and Leonard Teale and arts patron Ian Potter. We are beginning to see the effects of the steep rise in postwar immigration flow through to the ADB. Artist Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski was born in Poland. Pilar Moreno de Otaegui, co-founded the Spanish Club of Sydney. Chinese restaurateur and community leader Ming Poon (Dick) Low migrated to Victoria in 1953. Often we have a dearth of information about the domestic lives of our subjects; politician Olive Zakharov, however, bravely disclosed at the Victorian launch of the federal government’s campaign to Stop Violence Against Women in 1993 that she was a survivor of domestic violence in her second marriage. Take a dip into the many fascinating lives of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

This two-volume collection brings together the first 56 Joseph Fisher Lectures in economics and commerce, presented at the Adelaide University every other year since 1904. Funds for the Lectures, together with a medal for the top accounting student each year, were kindly provided by a £1,000 endowment to the University by the prominent Adelaide businessman Joseph Fisher in 1903. The Lectures address a wide range of Australian economic issues, in addition to some international economic issues of national significance. They have stood the test of time extremely well, while also providing a reminder of the events and concerns that were prominent at different times during the past century.

This two-volume collection brings together the first 53 Joseph Fisher Lectures in economics and commerce, presented at the Adelaide University every other year since 1904. Funds for the Lectures, together with a medal for the top accounting student each year, were kindly provided by a £1,000 endowment to the University by the prominent Adelaide businessman Joseph Fisher in 1903. The Lectures adress a wide range of Australian economic issues, in addition to some international economic issues of national significance. They have stood the test of time extremely well, while also providing a reminder of the events and concerns that were prominent at different times during the past century.