The Protestant Work Ethic and the Australian Mercantile Elite, 1880–1914

This article tests, in the Australian context, Max Weber's thesis that the work ethic of capitalism owed its origins to Protestantism. It studies the Australian Protestant churches for the presence of a work ethic, and investigates whether the Catholic Church also promoted such a moral precept to its members. The study then examines whether the work ethic of the Australian mercantile elite was drawn from that of the Protestant churches, from which most of its members came. The article proceeds to describe how the mercantile elite removed the religious origins of the work ethic and made it one of the foundations of its creed of economic individualism. This creed was based on the self-righteous dogma that those who worked hard were rewarded by getting rich while those who were poor only had their own lack of hard work and thrift to blame. The article demonstrates that the work ethic of modern capitalism, as espoused by the Australian mercantile elite, was the result of the secularization of the work ethic of Protestantism, a process in which the religious content of the moral principle was removed.     

Racial identity, spatial mobility, and labor in the non-plantation rural South, 1880–1940

Across much of the rural South in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, crop-lien systems of agriculture devoted to plantation crops restricted the spatial and economic mobility of many black Southerners. Where crop-lien systems were infrequent, however, black Southerners had somewhat greater spatial and economic mobility, particularly in connection with the wage labor of the lumber industries. This article investigates the connections between perceptions of racial identity, spatial mobility, and labor in both the lumber industry and in non-plantation agriculture in St. Tammany Parish in southeastern Louisiana using census records, historical newspapers, and archival sources.