Challenging the ‘Slave-Driving Employers’: Understanding Victoria's 1896 Minimum Wage through a World-History Approach

In 1896 the colony of Victoria introduced the world's first legal minimum wage that also extended to adult men. It was much discussed around the world by commentators who saw its significance in terms of its radical break with the past. Traditionally conceptualised as an outcome of a domestic anti-sweating movement that focused on the exploitation of women and children in the clothing industry, I suggest that the radical innovation of the minimum wage is best explained if we adopt a world-history approach that recognises the potency of anti-slavery discourse in the nineteenth century, the encounter of British and Chinese workers in the context of urban manufacturing in 1890s Melbourne, and the ways in which the minimum wage, later theorised as a living wage, made the humanity of workers central to modern definitions of labour.     

Truth,plausibility, and the virtues of narrative at the millennium

While it is widely understood that medieval historiographers employed the techniques of rhetorical invention in their work, less attention has been paid to the way in which the standard of plausibility, upon which rhetorical invention was premised, could be reconciled with the historian's traditional obligation to tell the truth. This paper examines the ways in which the rhetorical doctrine of narratio probabilis was understood and put into practice by three authors active around the turn of the millennium: Richer of Saint-Rémi, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Adalbero of Laon. All three had been trained in the schools of northern Francia in the late tenth century and all reveal a sophisticated understanding of the doctrines of Ciceronian rhetoric, according to which plausible inventions were not seen to be incompatible with historical truth.     

VOLUNTEERS, NIMBYs, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: DILEMMAS OF DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE

The principle of environmental equity constitutes a challenge to local autonomy and democratic practice. Community protest is sometimes hailed as an expression of local autonomy, sometimes derided as NIMBYism. To disentangle these issues we must reexamine environmental justice in light of the distinction between distributional and procedural justice. A search for just procedures for distributing environmental burdens represents an unnecessarily truncated view. Procedural equity entails democratic participation not only with regard to distribution but in prior decisions affecting production of costs and benefits. Two brief case studies illustrate the possibility of reconciling environmental equity with local autonomy. Geographers concerned with environmental inequity might turn from mapping the distribution of burdens to mapping power relations between local communities and the structures producing those burdens.     

‘The Indian Gift’: A critical debate

In 1986 Jonathan Parry’s ‘The Gift, the Indian Gift and the “Indian Gift”’ claimed to overturn conventional understandings of Marcel Mauss, by arguing that market societies most idealize the distinction between gifts and commodities, and gift giving need not entail reciprocity. Based on an analysis of Hindu religious gifts, Parry proposed a broad framework for understanding how ideologies of exchange function in different economic and cosmological contexts. Thirty years later, this symposium considers the intellectual milieu in which The Indian Gift was written, and interrogates whether or not the work remains relevant to contemporary research and analysis. The symposium opens with a short introduction that provides some background to Parry’s essay and incorporates material from a recent interview with him. This is followed by critical comments on it by five influential thinkers on gift exchange: James Carrier, Chris Gregory, James Laidlaw, Marilyn Strathern and Yunxiang Yan. It ends with a short ‘revisionist’ note by Parry in which he tries to identify some of the limits of the Maussian approach for contemporary anthropology.