Claire E.F. Wright interrogates the challenges of interdisciplinarity

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity: easy to like, hard to do. (And to pronounce.) Despite decades of university rhetoric urging interdisciplinary scholarship, it remains an elusive and widely misunderstood objective. ‘Everyone wants interdisciplinary research but very few understand how it is produced’, as Claire E.F. Wright puts it in her debut monograph (2). In Australian Economic History, Wright sets out to examine the structures and conditions that enable (or not) interdisciplinary research, through the example of economic history – one of the oldest interdisciplinary fields. Over six chapters, Wright tracks Australian economic history from its origins with statistician Sir Timothy Coghlan in the late nineteenth century, to the twenty-first-century resurgence of interest in the material dimensions of the past – a revival that has produced ‘new histories of capitalism’ both here and overseas. Australian Economic History is almost two books in one: both a chronological history of the field of Australian economic history and an analysis of interdisciplinary knowledge production written with an eye to university policy. While the latter will be of great interest and relevance to anyone working in higher education, the former has a more niche appeal. The introduction and conclusion foreground the question of interdisciplinarity, yet the substantive chapters at times drift deep into the weeds of economic historiography – a hangover, perhaps, from the more empirical PhD that formed the basis of this book. That said, both the history and analysis are carried off with aplomb – no mean feat, given that the book (minus references and appendices) comes in at a slim 190 pages. Wright is not the first to tell the story of economic history in Australia, with the topic canvassed in various articles over the years. But in this pioneering book-length study of the topic, Wright presents a revisionist history that challenges the accepted ‘rise and fall’ narrative. The conventional story goes like this: after early forays in the interwar period, there was a postwar explosion in economic history, led by the ‘great man’ Noel Butlin, who founded the ‘orthodox’ school based at the Australian National University (ANU). As higher education expanded, economic history departments proliferated. By the 1980s, there was a peak of 50 dedicated economic historians nationwide. Then, in the wake of the Dawkins reforms, and the rise of the neoliberal university, the ‘departmental era’ collapsed. Student numbers plummeted, departments closed, retiring academics were not replaced. The few remaining