Gary B. Magee

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• D.Phil (Oxford)
• Professor at Monash University (Australia)

Review of an important book on one possible future development for the field of economic history.

We examine the relationship between local precinct-based activities of the Nazi (NSDAP) Party and voter turnout in the July 1932 Reichstag election. We find each additional NSDAP member per 10,000 eligible voters was associated with a 0.225 to 0.317 per cent increase in voter turnout, which corresponds to eight to 11 additional voters on election d...

This chapter looks at the formative years of the GDR. It begins by outlining the conditions of the immediate post-war period, identifying the challenges the new regime encountered. Chief among these was the task of returning the economy back to a stable, peacetime footing. Beyond that, the regime sought, in steps, to socialise the workplace, notabl...

This chapter brings together the different threads of analysis explored in preceding chapters. It discusses how the adoption of a behavioural economics approach to East German economic history can alter some of the common perceptions and beliefs about how Soviet-style economic systems operated. The new outlooks it generates, of course, do not chang...

In this chapter, a survey of East German economic history is undertaken and important gaps in our understanding are identified. Key among these is the observation that recent work in the field has tended to focus on what is seen as the system’s inevitable failure. Yet, East Germany’s economic history was always much more diverse than that. While th...

This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the key findings of behavioural economics. Particular attention is devoted to the question of how decisions are made and implemented in complex systems, such as planned economies. The main goal of the chapter is to introduce the concepts and terminology used in subsequent chapters. The topics discus...

In the 1970s and 1980s, the SED’s policy of continually expanding the provision of social welfare brought the state to the point of bankruptcy. Despite awareness of the trajectory the country was on, the party’s leadership opted not to act, choosing instead to continue on the same path. For some, this failure to act to avert crisis is seen as proof...

Confronted by chronic shortages and low productivity, the East German regime constantly sought ways to find savings and efficiencies. Under the mantra of “intensification” and socialist “rationalisation”, it experimented with a host of measures to free up resources. This chapter focuses its attention on one of its most significant attempts at inten...

This chapter explores the GDR’s search for new and distinctly socialist sources of productivity growth in the l950s and 1960s. It examines the case of the Mitrofanov Method. This method, developed by the Soviet engineer, Sergei Mitrofanov, gave rise to the concept of group technology, a manufacturing technique in which parts having similar characte...

East Germany’s economic history is typically told as a story of the unravelling of an inherently flawed system. Yet, while the system’s inefficiency is undeniable, its economic history was much richer than its comparatively poor economic performance suggests. For many who lived there, it was a system that, over its forty years, was capable of achie...

This article explores the link between the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany and internal resistance within the German Democratic Republic. It finds that ongoing payment of reparations out of local production by East Germans, via the Soviet’s ownership of prominent local companies, affected both the incidence and the intensity of unrest experien...

This chapter outlines the key contours of Australian economic history between 1870 and 2010 in a comparative perspective. Overall, the story it tells is a positive one, in spite of the vexing challenges that Australia has faced. Despite undergoing relative economic decline and a fundamental reorientation in the direction of its trade over this peri...

Are deep-rooted democratic, and other political, traditions related to geographical manifestations of resistance to authoritarian regimes? In this article, we address this question by studying the regional pattern of the most serious form of resistance experienced in prewar Nazi Germany, namely, those acts of resistance that resulted in arrest for...

Online Appendix to Wayne Geerling, Gary Magee and Russell Smyth,“Occupation, Reparations and Rebellion: The Soviets and the East German Uprising of 1953”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History

We examine how the decision-making of political elites respond to an imminent external threat to the existence of the state in times of war. To do so, we exploit exogeneous variation in exposure to battle deaths and bombing raids to estimate the effect of variation in the intensity of war on the probability that individuals charged with treason and...

This is the online appendix for 'Bad News from the Front' published in Economic Inquiry

The choice to resist dictatorship or not is commonly depicted as a matter of personal morality and courage. Adopting concepts from the economics of identity, this article analyzes precinct-level data on arrests for high treason in prewar Nazi Germany to determine whether regional factors also contributed to observed patterns of resistance. It finds...

To what extent do judges in courts in authoritarian regimes merely implement the will of the state? What determines judges’ behaviour in such contexts? We address these questions by examining the role of judicial policy preferences in influencing whether judges in Nazi Germany sentenced defendants charged with serious political offences - treason a...

A media report which summarizes the paper: GEERLING, W., MAGEE, G.B., MISHRA, V., and SMYTH, R., 'Hitler's Judges: Ideological Commitment and the Death Penalty in Nazi Germany'. The Economic Journal (2018).

The report provides a succinct overview of the new book Quantifying Resistance: Political Crime and the People’s Court in Nazi Germany, authored by Wayne A. Geerling and Gary Magee and published by Springer in September 2017.

This chapter provides a comprehensive description of the data and sources that lie at the heart of the research undertaken and reported in this book. It notes that the collection of court records, from which the Quantifying Resistance database was constructed, the Resistance as High Treason project (Widerstand als Hochverrat), was the first of its...

This chapter provides an overview of some of the key personal and environmental characteristics of those who participated in serious resistance to the Nazi regime. It reminds us that as a group they were more than just the politics to which they subscribed. Moreover, the chapter describes a range of interesting phenomena: inter alia, the steady agi...

In this chapter, we turn our attention to another feature of the resister’s story, one that has typically been less scrutinised and certainly is not as well understood: their experience once they had been arrested and entered custody. It was there in the interrogation chambers, cells and court rooms of the Nazi regime that the personal consequences...

In this chapter, our analysis of serious internal resistance to Hitler’s regime begins with an examination of the overall structure and composition of that resistance from the inception of Nazi rule in January 1933 through to the collapse of the German legal system in early 1945. The chapter seeks to answer two fundamental questions in particular,...

Since the end of the Second World War, historical research on German and Austrian resistance has steadily expanded, deepened and enrichened our understanding of the phenomenon. Like all healthy fields of research, though, mysteries and gaps not only persist but are constantly being opened up. This book has sought to add to that accumulated knowledg...

Despite the personal dangers involved, a remarkable number of Germans and Austrians chose to resist the Nazi regime. The aim of this chapter is to provide a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of the myriad groups and organisations of differing political, religious and ethnic persuasions that took the fateful decision to resist the regime. The ch...

This book presents and uses a major, new database of the most serious forms of internal resistance to the Nazi state to study empirically the whole phenomenon of resistance to an authoritarian regime. By studying serious political resistance from a quantitative historical perspective, the book opens up a new avenue of research for economic history....

This article compares the real GDP per capita of the Cape Colony and Natal between 1861 and 1909 with that of Australia's two most developed colonies, Victoria and New South Wales. Estimates of European and non-European GDP per capita for both South African colonies are also provided. Together, this information allows for the first time an evaluati...

This article examines econometrically the impact of judicial discretion on the sentencing of a sample of individuals convicted of high treason or treason in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939. It finds that, notwithstanding the political nature of these trials, senior Nazi-era judges not only exhibited statistically significant levels of discretion...

This article explores whether deregulation of the Australian retail banking sector in the 1980s delivered the enhanced consumer choice that had been promised. Using new data on banking products and their usage, it analyses consumers' ability to select optimal ‘frontier’ products. It concludes that following deregulation of retail banking, product o...

Australia's economic history is the story of the transformation of an indigenous economy and a small convict settlement into a nation of nearly 23 million people with advanced economic, social and political structures. It is a history of vast lands with rich, exploitable resources, of adversity in war, and of prosperity and nation building. It is a...

Analysis of the sixty-nine juveniles tried for high treason before the People's Court in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, based on the available court records, finds that juvenile resistance in Nazi Germany possessed a distinct form and character; it was a phenomenon rather than an exceptional act. Juvenile resisters charged with high treason we...

This article examines the introduction of piecework, a key aspect of the Soviet workplace, in occupied East Germany. As elsewhere, its implementation encountered persistent hostility from the workforce. What made this episode different, though, was that this process occurred within a context of acute economic and political uncertainty. As this arti...

This paper examines the introduction of piecework, a key aspect of the Soviet workplace, in occupied East Germany. As elsewhere, its implementation encountered persistent hostility from the workforce. What made this episode different, though, was that this process occurred within a context of acute economic and political uncertainty. As this paper...

Focusing on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914, this book provides a perspective on the relationship between empire and globalisation. It shows how distinct structures of economic opportunity developed around the people who settled across a wider British World through the co-ethnic networks they created. Yet these networ...

Focusing on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914, this book provides a perspective on the relationship between empire and globalisation. It shows how distinct structures of economic opportunity developed around the people who settled across a wider British World through the co-ethnic networks they created. Yet these networ...

'Are Preferential Trading Agreements building blocks or stumbling blocks? Most economists are skeptical of their benefits, but politicians and bureaucrats evidently like them. This timely and rich contribution to the debate, by an eminent group of economists and lawyers, assesses the issues with reference to the Australia-China negotiations. Import...

Between 1870 and the 1950s, the volume and proportion of British exports to the Empire and Commonwealth grew steadily. Many have attributed this trend to non-market advantages allegedly rooted in imperial rule and the inherent Britishness of these markets. Quantitative methods show, however, that in most periods, other considerations, most notably...

Britain of the nineteenth century was a net recipient of migrant remittances. Surprisingly little, however, is known about the flow of such funds to the UK. This article addresses this hiatus in several ways. First, it provides an account of the main mechanisms by which remittances were transferred in this period. Second, it presents new estimates...

This article uses money order data to examine the determinants of British migrant remittances prior to 1914. Using panel data and cointegration analysis, it provides evidence of four distinct types of remittance behavior, lending support to Lucas and Stark s theory that remittances are driven by an implicit contract between remitter and remittee. T...

Typically, economists have not devoted much attention to the act of invention. This article attempts to redress this situation by exploring a form of cognition, analogical transfer, which is thought by some researchers to lie at the heart of successful creativity. An analogical transfer is said to have occurred when information and experiences from...

Between 1870 and the 1950s British exports to the Empire and Commonwealth steadily grew in terms of volume and as a proportion of all exports. To many this reflected the non-market advantages Britain enjoyed there, advantages allegedly rooted in imperial rule and the inherent Britishness of these markets. This paper tests this claim. Using quantita...

THE SHAPE AND COURSE OF BRITISH MANUFACTURING The global economic leadership that Britain enjoyed in the nineteenth century had its foundations in the nation's unprecedented industrial capability. To many Victorians and Edwardians this was a fact of life; it followed almost inexorably that should the uniqueness of that capability ever be lost, Brit...

The belief that Britain's empire markets were soft is well entrenched in the literature. It is, however, a belief that has been largely untested. Indeed, the literature does not even offer an explicit definition of softness. This article attempts to fill this gap by discussing the meaning of the term and then posing the question whether between 187...

The belief that Britain’s empire markets were soft is well entrenched in the literature. It is, however, a belief that has been largely untested. Indeed, the literature does not even offer an explicit definition of softness. This paper attempts to fill this gap by discussing the meaning of the term and, then, posing the question whether between 187...

This paper uses patent data from Victoria to examine the roles played by skill and experience in Australian invention during the colonial era. In addition to identifying a broadening involvement of Australians in inventive activity in the second half of the nineteenth century, this paper also provides evidence which indicates that technological cre...

This pioneering 1997 study examines the economic development of the British paper industry between 1860 and 1914 - an era in which it is often claimed that the origins of Britain’s relative economic decline are first witnessed. For paper-making, this was also a period in which an array of important new forces, including inter alia the development o...

This paper uses patent data from colonial Australia to provide an estimate of comparative Anglo- American inventive activity at the end of the nineteenth century. These data confirm the traditional belief of a widening inventive gap in this period. The paper argues that much of this gap can be accounted for by each nation’s factor endowment and dem...

Knowledge Generation is an account of a technological dawn that occurred long before the computer and the Internet. In ground-breaking research, Gary Magee scrutinized Australian colonial patent data to survey the entire spectrum of technological activity, and found evidence of extraordinary local inventiveness. In this book he creates a conceptual...

Poor patenting performance is often taken as a sign of low inventiveness. This article explores this belief by looking at the case of 19th-century Victoria, where the level of foreign patenting consistently grew at a much faster rate than that of local patenting. By mapping movements in both foreign and Australian revealed technological advantage i...

In the literature on British economic decline entrepreneurship is typically assessed by its outcome. By contrast, this paper argues that the soundness of entrepreneurship is best tested by viewing it ex ante. In other words, it is the process, and not the product, of entrepreneurship that is important in determining its quality. When this is accept...

This pioneering 1997 study examines the economic development of the British paper industry between 1860 and 1914 - an era in which it is often claimed that the origins of Britain's relative economic decline are first witnessed. For paper-making, this was also a period in which an array of important new forces, including inter alia the development o...

For most of the nineteenth century Britain held an undisputed lead in the field of paper-machine technology. By the 1890s this lead had been lost to America. This article argues that Britain's loss of technological preeminence at this time had much more to do with the greater scale of the American market and the willingness of American manufacturer...

In Europe, there is a long history of administrative attempts, initially at the local and then later at the national level, to prevent, control and limit the violence of epidemics. In assessing the relative contribution of local and national management of disease, this article suggest that a distinction between the external and internal sources of...

One of the least studied aspects of Australian economic history is technological change. This article addresses the subject by using patent statistics from nineteenth–century Victoria to examine the determinants of the supply of inventive ideas in the late colonial era. Such an examination indicates that, while both demand– and supply–side features...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oxford, 1994.