The Minimum Wage in Australian and World History

On Monday, February 24, 2014, at 4:00, the Washington History Seminar, “Historical Perspectives on International and National Affairs,” continues with Australia's Historic Minimum Wage: A World History Approach, by Marilyn Lake of the 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.

The seminar will take place in the Woodrow Wilson Center, 6th Floor Moynihan Boardroom, in the Ronald Reagan Building, Federal Triangle Metro Stop.  Reservations requested because of limited seating: mbarber@historians.org.  The seminar is sponsored jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Wilson Center.