Washington History Seminar
Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs

Australia’s Historic Minimum Wage:
 A World History Approach

Marilyn Lake
UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE  

Histories of the minimum wage are usually written within national analytic frameworks. Research in the New York Public Library on the first minimum wage, legislated in Victoria, Australia, in 1896, convinced historian Marilyn Lake that a world history approach was necessary, one that located this experiment in “state socialism” in the context of both the longue duree of imperial labor relations and encounters between the subjects of the British and Chinese empires in the new world of urban Melbourne.

Marilyn Lake is Professor in History and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Her recent publications include Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Campaign for Racial Equality, co-authored with Henry Reynolds, (2008) and the articles “Chinese colonists assert their ‘common human rights’” in the Journal of World History (2010) and “Colonial Australia in its Regional Context” in The Cambridge History of Australia, vol. 1 (2013).

Report from the Field: To Be Announced

Monday February 24, 2014
4:00 p.m.
Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Board Room
Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop

Reservations requested because of limited seating:
mbarber@historians.org or 202-450-3209

March 3: James Graham Wilson, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State,
“Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptation,
Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War”

The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center. It meets weekly during the academic year. See www.nationalhistorycenter.org for the schedule, speakers, topics, and dates as well as webcasts and podcasts. The seminar thanks the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for its support.