Academy Fellow

Professor Gary Magee is one of Australia’s leading economic historians. His research has advanced historical knowledge of industrial development, technological change, authoritarianism, transnationalism and globalization. He has been an Australian Bicentennial Fellow at the Menzies Research Centre, KCL; a visiting fellow at Oxford; and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK).

He has published five major research monographs, two with Cambridge University Press, one of the leading academic publishers. He has also regularly published articles in highly ranked international refereed journals, including The Economic Journal, Economic History Review, Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Central European History, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Business History, and Business History Review. He has also contributed to major publications in his field, most notably the Cambridge Economic Histories of Britain, Australia, and the Modern World. He has been awarded more than 400,000 dollars in research income.

His research has been acclaimed by peers in history, economic history and economics. David Pearce (UCL), for example, wrote in the THE (October 24, 1997, p. 35) that his first book, Productivity and Performance, was ‘an important contribution to the modern perspective on economic history in which economic theory combines with maximum feasible quantification’. His second book, Knowledge Generation, quantitatively analyzed for the first time the patterns, structures and determinants of technological change in colonial Australia. David Greasley (Edinburgh) wrote in the Economic Record (Vol. 78, December 2002, pp. 496-97) that the work provided ‘a valued addition’ to our ‘understanding of long-run Australian economic development’, and ‘also makes a useful contribution to comparative British-American economic history, by identifying by industry-use, Australian patent activity with origins in these countries’. His third book, Empire and Globalisation, focused on the great population movement of British emigrants before 1914 to provide a new perspective on the connection between empire, transnationalism and globalization. Stuart Ward (Copenhagen) described the work in Reviews in History as ‘a masterful synthesis’, which “offers a rich table of food for thought that will influence future research agendas across a range of disciplines. … It is sure to be devoured and debated for years to come’. Similarly, Ian Phimister (Sheffield) called the book in the Economic History Review (64:3, August 2011, pp. 1038-40) a ‘path-breaking study’ which ‘explores the relationship between globalization and empire’ and has ‘reinvigorated ways of thinking about these subjects. Comprehensive, stimulating, and provocative, Empire and Globalisation will influence debate and research on the past dynamics of globalization for decades to come’.

His two most recent books have focused on behaviour within authoritarian societies. Quantifying Resistance, is a seminal study that uses a path-breaking new database of internal resistance to the Nazi state to analyze empirically for the first time the phenomenon of resistance to an authoritarian regime, whereas Socialism With a Human Face provides a new economic history of East Germany that uses key insights from behavioural economics.

Gary was listed as Australia’s ‘Field Leader’ in two fields: Economic History and History (The Australian, 26/9/18, pp, 12 & 36 https://specialreports.theaustralian.com.au/1163512/ )

2010 to present: Professor of Economics and Economic History (Level E), Monash University

Fellow, Royal Historical Society, UK

1. G.B. MAGEE and W. Geerling, Socialism with a Human Face: Using Behavioural Economics to Understand East German Economic History (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).

2.Geerling, W. and MAGEE, G.B., W. Quantifying Resistance: Political Crime and the People’s Court in Nazi Germany (Springer, 2017).

3. MAGEE, G.B. and Thompson, A. S., Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Capital and Goods in the British World, 1850-1914. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), xxii + 291 pp. ISBN: 978 0 521 89889 8. 

4. 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 128 (September 2018). Pp. 2414-2449. DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12497

5. MAGEE, G.B, Greyling, L. and Verhoef, G., ‘South Africa in the Australian Mirror: Per capita Real GDP in the Cape Colony, Natal, Victoria and New South Wales, 1861-1909’. Economic History Review 69 (2016): 3, pp. 893–914

6. Geerling, W., MAGEE, G.B., and Brooks, R., ‘Cooperation, Defection and Resistance in Nazi Germany’. Explorations in Economic History 58 (2015), pp. 125-139.

7.MAGEE, G.B., Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry: Labour, Capital and Technology in Britain and America, 1860–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

8.MAGEE, G.B. and Thompson, A. S., ‘The Global and Local: Explaining Migrant

Remittance Flows in the English-speaking World, 1880-1914’. Journal of Economic History 66: 1 (2006), pp. 177-202. 

9.MAGEE, G.B. and Thompson, A. S., ‘”Lines of Credit, Debts of Obligation”: Migrant

Remittances and the British World, c.1870-1914’. Economic History Review LIX: 3 (2006), pp. 539-577. 

10.MAGEE, G.B., “Rethinking Invention: Cognition and the Economics of Technological Creativity”. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 57 (2005), pp. 29-48.