Rate My Professor Edwyna Harris

Edwyna Harris is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics within the Monash Business School at Monash University. Her research focuses on economic history and environmental and resource economics, particularly the economic and political history of colonial South Australia. She is collaborating with Sumner La Croix on a book manuscript entitled From Utopian Colony to Self-Governing Democracy: Economic and Political Change in Colonial South Australia, 1829-1857. Harris investigates the implementation of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's principles of systematic colonization, the evolution of land property rights, South Australia's copper mining boom in the 1840s and its avoidance of Dutch disease, employment relief programs for assisted immigrants from 1838 to 1843, and the path to self-governing democracy. Her scholarship also documents the effects of colonization on indigenous populations, including a decline from an estimated 9,000 to 21,000 individuals in 1836 to 6,000 to 7,000 in 1861 due to colonial violence, disease, and displacement. She received her PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Harris has published extensively on these themes. Key publications include "Did different rules for establishing property rights in land impact development? Evidence from colonial South Australia, 1837–1910" (Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 2025), "Cliometric contributions to Australia’s economic history" (Handbook of Cliometrics, 2024), "Australia’s forgotten copper mining boom: understanding how South Australia avoided Dutch disease, 1843-1850" (Economic Record, 2021), "Understanding the gains to capitalists from colonization: lessons from Robert E. Lucas, Jr., Karl Marx and Edward Gibbon Wakefield" (Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2021), and "South Australia’s employment relief program for assisted immigrants: promises and reality, 1838-1843" (Labor History, 2020). For the 2021 Economic Record paper, she shared the Economic Record Best Paper Prize with Sumner La Croix. Harris has served as Editor in Chief of the Australian Economic History Review from 2016 to 2020 and is President of the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand from 2026 to 2030.