No abstract

Economic statistics are now such an ingrained feature of everyday political discourse that they have recently become ripe as topics of historical scrutiny. This study contributes to this scholarship by shifting attention from what has been a largely American-Anglo discussion to the innovations of prominent Australian statists in the colonial and early Federation periods. In contrast to recent approaches that have treated economic statistics as emerging during the twentieth century as a discrete body of knowledge distinct from nineteenth-century 'moral statistics', this history is approached as an exercise in 'accounting in history'. It highlights both patterns and discontinuities in governmental deliberations that facilitated statistical innovation, historicising and complicating the relationship between economics and statistics as domains of knowledge. By drawing attention to the tensions and overlaps of successive intellectual projects engaged by Australian government statisticiansdescribed here in terms of transparency and control; the average man and colonial progress; the breadwinner and national wealth; the human unit and the social organism; and the consumer and 'the economy'it develops new perspectives on why calculations of economic averages, indexes and national income emerged as devices of government. As major producers and consumers of contemporary economic statistics, such perspectives might provide fresh epistemological and interdisciplinary grounding for business and management scholars.

As we enter the 2020s, our times are daily getting more urgent. The climate and ecological emergency, catastrophic Australian bushfires, and now the COVID-19 pandemic and associated economic meltdown have launched us into a new era of seemingly incessant crisis. Through it all, history remains omnipresent. In press conferences and Zoom meetings, in newspapers and Twitter feeds, history is invoked to bring sense and meaning to our disorienting present. As public commentary mythologises the past in order to manage a destabilised and unknown future, what should the response of professional historians be? What are our responsibilities in the face of cataclysmic change? In this forum on 'History in Urgent Times', we present three attempts to grapple with what it means to be a historian in this alarming historical moment, and ask how historians ought to respond.

Capitalism is back. Three decades ago, when all alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets appeared discredited, talk of capitalism seemed passé. Now, after a decade of political and economic turmoil, capitalism and its temporal critique of progress and decline again seems an indispensable category to understanding a world in flux. Among the social sciences, historians have led both the embrace and critique of this ‘re-emergent’ concept. This roundtable discussion between leading and emerging Australian scholars working across histories of economy, work, policy, geography and political economy, extends this agenda. Representing the outcome of a workshop convened at La Trobe University in November 2018 and responding to questions posed by conveners Huf and Rees, five participants debate the nature, utility and future of the new constellation of ‘economic’ historical scholarship. While conducted well before the outbreak of COVID-19, the ensuring discussion nevertheless speaks saliently to the crises of our times.

The role of business and multinational corporations (MNCs) in early international environmental governance is not well understood. Typically, historians accord business growing influence after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, coincident with the rise of a market-oriented sustainable development paradigm. In this article, we highlight the considerable involvement of self-styled business actors in the formative 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment and subsequent establishment of the UN Environment Programme. Tracing the interconnected networks of British economist Barbara Ward, Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Canadian oilman-turned-UNEP boss Maurice Strong, we identify business actors as key in the passage from ‘planetary’ to ‘global’ environmental rationales characteristic of environmental politics between the 1970s and 1990s. However, we also show that business was a sought-after (even if often ambiguous) partner in the 1970s’ moment of innovative ‘planetary’ environmental thinking and institution making. The contested status of MNCs in 1970s internationalism shaped this early business involvement in the history of environmental governance.