Australia's relative prosperity and its actions and fortunes in the international economy have always had a deep resonance within Australian society. Some historians suggest that the first waves of British immigrants to Australia brought with them the social and political attitudes dominant in the Chartist economic upheavals in England in the early nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, Australia had become the richest society in the world in per capita terms. The massive expansion of the Australian economy between the gold rushes and the First World War had been driven by a sustained surge in demand by the European and North American economies for the commodities that Australia had in abundance: coal, iron, cotton, wool and timber. Given its shortage of labour to produce these commodities, Australia was one of the first countries to intensively capitalise its agricultural and extractive industries. Australian society's Chartist heritage and the relative shortage of labour led to the formation of powerful labour unions, high wages and close attention to the conditions of social justice in workers' remuneration. But Australia's commodities endowments also made it especially vulnerable to the fluctuations in the global economy. When the world economy slowed, a slump in demand for commodities was usually an early and sustained symptom, leading to downturns in the Australian economy that were often proportionately greater than recessions in most other advanced economies.