Warren Swain and Karen Fairweather, University of Auckland, have posted To Your Marrowbones All: Loan Transactions and the Law in 19th Century New South Wales:
Economic growth in the early Australian colony was fuelled by credit. The boom ended in a slump in the 1840s. By this time questions had started to be raised about how credit should be regulated in the colony. In England, the prohibitions on usury which governed loan transactions were not completely abolished until 1854. The application of the English usury laws in the colony was controversial. Some favoured regulating interest rates whilst others saw it as likely to discourage investment. Usury provides a good example of a wider debate about the extent to which English law ought to apply in the different conditions of the early colony of New South Wales.--Dan Ernst
