The persistence and dissolution of the British open-field community exemplifies a classic case of dynamic property rights transformation under specific historical conditions. Drawing on Barzel’s Economic Analysis of Property Rights, this study interprets the open-field village as a property rights community centred on fragmented and incomplete common right. Within specific technological and market constraints, cooperative allocation mechanisms enabled relatively low transaction costs, producing an ‘efficient under constraints’ arrangement. As markets expanded, new land attributes acquired value, and measurement techniques improved, the costs of maintaining the traditional structure increased, undermining its efficiency. The parliamentary enclosure became a profound process of property rights restructuring, in which state authority separated land attributes from the commons and redefined exclusive private ownership according to market principles. Enclosure represented not only a change in production but also a fundamental reallocation of rights. This historical case illuminates the complex balance between efficiency and equity in institutional change.

This conversation was held with Selwyn Cornish in mid-2023 in Canberra. It covers some of the many contributions Selwyn has made, and is continuing to make, to both the history of economic thought and Australian academic life in his long career at the Australian National University. It also covers his interest in the lives of practical economists and the history of the Reserve Bank.

In their stormy response to Nancy MacLean's book Democracy in Chains, some academics on the libertarian right have conducted a concerted defense of Nobel Laureate James Buchanan's credentials as an anti-racist, or at least a non-racist. An odd component of their argument is a claim of innocence by association: the peripatetic South African economist and Mont Pelerin Society founding member William Harold Hutt was against apartheid; Buchanan was a friend and supporter of Hutt; therefore, Buchanan could not have been abetting segregationists with his support for public funding of segregated private schools. At the core of this chain of argument is the inference that Hutt's opposition to apartheid proves that Hutt himself was committed to racial equality. However, just as there were white supremacists who opposed slavery in the United States, we demonstrate Hutt was a white supremacist who opposed apartheid in South Africa. We document how Hutt embraced notions of black inferiority, even in The Economics of the Colour Bar, his most ferocious attack on apartheid. Whether or not innocence by association is a sound defense of anyone's ideology or conduct, Hutt, himself, was not innocent of white supremacy.

Plant versus Coase on the firm. This paper focuses on Arnold Plant (Coase’s teacher) and his little known contribution to the theory of the firm, ‘Centralize or Decentralize?’ A very brief biography of Plant is given followed by an outline of his paper and then the paper is examined and compared to Coases’s ‘The Nature of the Firm’.