{"title":"Public virtue, private ambition: Women owners of private hospitals in early twentieth-century New Zealand","authors":"Ann-Marie Quinn","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70032","url":null,"abstract":"<p>New Zealand's early-twentieth-century health service was a two-tier system of state hospitals supported by an expanding network of over 300 private hospitals, almost exclusively owned by nurses and midwives. This article will show that this environment was created by a legislative framework introduced between 1901 and 1906, requiring nurses, midwives, and their private hospitals to be registered, licensed, and monitored. Stringent regulation could have stifled the industry. Instead, it provided fertile ground on which many women flourished as enterprising businesswomen who made significant contributions to their communities, breaking with traditional notions of nurses solely as carers and handmaidens to doctors.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"239-255"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.70032","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148522930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women's land ownership in Victoria, 1880–1930: Contributions to a fuller picture","authors":"Kathryn M. Hunter","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Responding to calls for more research on Australian women's property ownership this article draws on underutilised shire rate books. The data challenge stubborn historiographical assumptions that women's land ownership in federation-era Victoria was insignificant. A systematic analysis of rate books from five rural Victorian shires between 1880 and 1930, reveals white women as a substantial and growing proportion of rural landowners, peaking around 1920. Despite disconnection between bureaucratic representations of women as engaged only in ‘home duties’ and their actual economic activity, women's land ownership increased substantially in these decades, revealing their stable and enduring presence in Victoria's rural economy.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"226-238"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.70035","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148534462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Catherine Bishop, Jennifer Aston, Julia Bradshaw, Terry Kass, Louise Prowse, Moira White, Benjamin Woods
{"title":"Making, spending and saving: Women and money in Australasia","authors":"Catherine Bishop, Jennifer Aston, Julia Bradshaw, Terry Kass, Louise Prowse, Moira White, Benjamin Woods","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70036","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Moneymaking, investment and the giving and receiving of loans are often portrayed historically as men's business. Even female spending was patrolled by men. This article, and the special issue it introduces, uses new research from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. It explores the intriguing ways in which unexpected sources can be used to reveal that making, spending and saving could be women's business too.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"129-151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148532960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becky Johnston (1858–1938): A case study of Aboriginal women's financial agency in early 20th century New South Wales","authors":"Nadine Wilson","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70037","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article introduces Becky Johnston, a mixed-descent Worimi woman on the lower Mid-North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. During the 1920s, Johnston became a businesswoman and landowner despite the economic limitations for Indigenous Australians. Beyond domestic labour settings, historians have overlooked how Aboriginal women participated in the settler-colonial economy. I argue that living within the Myall Lakes timber-getting industry, Johnston learned to capitalise on economic opportunities in her ancestral Country, demonstrating that histories of Aboriginal women's financial agency may be recovered from understudied areas of rural and regional Australia.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"209-225"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.70037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148522720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The currency of femininity: Earning, spending and saving among office girls in post-war New Zealand","authors":"Sarah Christie","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how post-war clerical work shaped young New Zealand women's financial and social modernity. It explores how earning a ‘wage of one's own’ enabled women to perform modern femininity while negotiating ideals of glamour, thrift, and respectability. Drawing on women's magazines, bank archives, and oral histories, it analyses the figure of the ‘glamorous business girl’, whose body functioned as both spectacle and currency within the office. Through dressmaking, saving, and travel, women channelled their wages into self-fashioning and aspiration, revealing how economic practice, display, and mobility intertwined to redefine post-war femininity and agency.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"256-276"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148534463","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Faith, gender and financial investment: Providence and Presbyterianism in Scotland and abroad","authors":"Jennifer Jones, Susan Poole","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70007","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Mid-nineteenth century fictional representations of misdirected investment by widows and clergy position them as ignorant in financial matters and hence pitiable. While scholars have recognised female agency in nineteenth century commerce, insufficient attention has been paid to religious belief in financial decision-making. By examining the link between investment and Providentialism, through the lived experience of the ‘widow, the clergyman and the reckless’, this article demonstrates that both men and women attributed success and failure to God's Providence. This examination of investment decisions by religious Scots suggests that market loss was measured in entwined moral and economic terms.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"152-174"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.70007","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148522737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An occupation for a lady: Businesswomen in Brisbane arcades, 1880s–1920s","authors":"Nicole J. Davis","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Recently, Australian historians have increasingly uncovered the lives and accomplishments of nineteenth and early twentieth-century businesswomen, who ran their establishments in a time when legal strictures restricting their financial autonomy could disguise or suggest a lack of involvement in such roles. These scholars also resist historiographies that emphasise men as the minds and money behind business ventures and demonstrate women were regularly driving forces behind commercial endeavours, both large and small, not just in Australasia but across the world. This article examines businesswomen at a specific type of site in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brisbane—the arcade. While often represented purely as customers, women also comprised a significant number of entrepreneurs who owned, ran and invested in businesses located in arcades. They ranged from milliners and dressmakers to tearoom proprietors and palmists, from nurses' agents to owners of the arcades themselves. Tracing the lives of three such women in Brisbane's Grand Arcade during the 1880s to 1920s, this article explores their lives and business interests—before, during and after their time operating there. It utilises biography as a method to explore business history and how life events influenced women's entrepreneurship in the city in this period. While each of these women came from very different backgrounds and had diverse future trajectories, locating them at a single site highlights some of the key issues for women entrepreneurs, not only in Brisbane but across Australasia and the globe.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 2","pages":"175-208"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2026-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148534195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How did Japan catch-up with the West? Some implications of recent revisions to Japan's historical growth record","authors":"Stephen Broadberry, Kyoji Fukao, Tokihiko Settsu","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70012","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Revised GDP data suggest that Japan was more than one-third richer in 1874 than suggested by Maddison, and that Meiji period growth built on earlier development. Despite trend GDP per capita growth during the Tokugawa Shogunate, the catching-up process only started after 1890 with respect to Britain, and after World War I with respect to the United States. Although catching-up was driven by productivity growth in manufacturing, Japanese export success also depended on limiting the growth of real wages. Despite claims of a distinctive Asian path of labour-intensive industrialisation, capital played an important role in the catching-up process.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 1","pages":"3-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.70012","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147565602","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Correction to ‘Migration to Australia, the transition from sail to steam, and the SS Great Britain’","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>\u0000 <span>Hatton, T.J.</span> (<span>2025</span>) <span>Migration to Australia, the transition from sail to steam, and the SS Great Britain</span>. <i>Asia-Pacific Economic History Review</i>, <span>65</span> (<span>2</span>), <span>173</span>–<span>191</span>. https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70009\u0000 </p><p>On page 175, in the section ‘The Transition from Sail to Steam’, the date range at the end of the second paragraph should read as 1853–1857 instead of 1953–1957.</p><p>We apologise for this error.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/aehr.70029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The lascars' kettle: Lascar sailors on voyages to Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth century","authors":"Jennifer Ashton","doi":"10.1111/aehr.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/aehr.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Between 1793 and 1796, three inter-related sailing voyages took place around the coasts of Australia and New Zealand. On board each of these voyages were lascar sailors drawn from the Indian Ocean. This article looks at the experience of these sailors and considers how the racial hierarchies present on each of the voyages were sustained or challenged during times of crisis. In particular, it considers how co-operation might be a productive frame through which to examine on-board relationships between lascars and European crew and officers.</p>","PeriodicalId":100132,"journal":{"name":"Asia‐Pacific Economic History Review","volume":"66 1","pages":"81-98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147563993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}