This chapter examines when goods become owned. It starts with the traditional Demsetz model and then considers cases of nonlinear transaction costs.

More than 140 phrenologists ascended the platform as popular lecturers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand during the second half of the nineteenth century, seizing on scientific spectacle for their own physical and social mobility. These scientists – usually men – also often offered private consultations and blended phrenology with other forms of knowledge such as mesmerism or physiognomy. Joining waves of migration to and from new settlements, phrenologists faced harsh physical conditions, with women performers confronting the additional risks of gender-based violence. Phrenologists generally did not pursue respectability. Rather, in building up their personas, lecturers embraced the word ‘science’ as a signifier of progress and authority, policing the boundaries between the ‘valid’ science that they supposedly offered and that of their rivals. They lived in a state of tension between their public, fee-earning selves – founded on supposedly good reputations – and their private ordeals, struggling to make ends meet.

The year begins with emergency control policies designed to curb accelerating inflation. The government halts sale of gold. Political attacks on T. V. Soong become strong, especially in the Legislative Yuan. Soong resigned as head of the Executive Yuan in March 1947. Most of the reform policies adopted earlier in the year are then abandoned.

Political attacks on “bureaucratic capitalism” follow, with foreign businessmen joining the attack, as well as criticism of the “holy family” enterprises, those connected to the Soong and Kung families. Attacks on both accuse them of corruption, charges they try to refute.

Getting Chiang Kai-shek’s attention is a problem. Little can be done without an endorsement by Chiang. But he has little knowledge or interest in financial issues. His focus is on military matters. Foreign exchange woes worsen.

Chapter 6: 1948: The Collapse of Fabi and the Gold Yuan Disaster

Keywords: fabi, gold yuan, collapse of fabi, hyperinflation, Guangdong, Jiang Jingguo, reign of terror, collapse of the gold yuan, Soongs in exile

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

In “African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity,” Janet Neary considers the ways in which Black writers of the American West presented California as a brief loophole of economic opportunity for Black citizens in the expanding and consolidating nation – a way of defining place with fascinating parallels to Marrs’s work on memory. Although early Black newspapers in California linked economic mobility with legal enfranchisement, Neary suggests that California’s idiosyncratic response to Reconstruction paradoxically shut down certain avenues of opportunity for Black citizens, centering wealth production with white property owners. Focusing on James Williams’s 1873 Life and Adventures of James Williams and Thomas Detter’s 1871 Nellie Brown, or the Jealous Wife, Neary argues that African American Western writers articulated economic possibility and upward mobility with social justice and racial equality, while simultaneously highlighting the mercenary and racially biased nature of the law both before and after Reconstruction.

turns to immigrant citizenship with a focus on California to carefully assess where the state currently stands with respect to progressive state citizenship and to situate the present moment in a sweep of the state’s history, which saw it pioneer and champion anti-Chinese and anti-immigrant legislation from its founding through the late 1990s and only move toward more pro-immigrant policies in the last two decades. We then explore key milestones in immigrant rights over the past decade and pinpoint 2015 as the year when progressive state citizenship became crystallized. Finally, we trace key factors that incubated and enabled the development of progressive state citizenship in California, including voter backlash against racial propositions, partisan shifts in the state legislature, and the growing strength of social movement actors across various regions, aided by long-term investment strategies by private foundations.

At the end of 1850 Edward Hargraves returned to Sydney from a year on the other side of the Pacific. He was one of the ‘Forty-Niners’ who had converged on California in search of gold. Although unsuccessful in that quest, Hargraves was struck by the similarity between the gold country there and the transalpine slopes of his homeland. In the summer of 1851 he crossed the Blue Mountains to Bathurst and washed a deposit of sand and gravel from a waterhole to disclose a grain of gold in a tin dish. A revival of bushranging in the 1860s drew on the discontent of the rural poor, and the young men who joined Ned Kelly, the most legendary bushranger of them all, were sons of struggling or unsuccessful selectors. From 1877 England and Australia began playing regular cricket matches. The first Australian victory on English soil in 1882 gave birth to a mock obituary to England’s supremacy and thus the Ashes, which are the world’s oldest international sporting contest.