Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2015
From the mid-nineteenth century, raw wool became a global commodity as new producing countries in the Southern Hemisphere supplied the world's growing textile industries in the North. The selling practices of these big-five exporters—Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Uruguay—ranged from auction through a hybrid of auction and private sale to exclusively private sale. We explore why these countries persisted with different marketing arrangements, contradicting two streams of literature on institutions: isomorphism and the new institutional economics. The article makes several important contributions through blending distinct branches of theory and by focusing on the international constraints to convergence in an earlier period of globalization.
1 For an account of the growth of the woolen textile industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Jenkins, David, “The Western Wool Textile Industry in the Nineteenth Century” and “Wool Textiles in the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, vol. 2, ed. Jenkins, David (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 761–89Google Scholar, 993–1022.
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49 We owe this point to Malcolm Abbott.
50 Ville, Rural Entrepreneurs; Butlin, Investment, 57–166.
51 The wool trade was both a result of and a contributor to a “network” resulting from the movement of people, goods, and capital within the British world, as described by Magee and Thompson, Empire and Globalisation.
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74 “The success of grading depended entirely on the extent to which each bale contained wool of one quality only and each lot contained bales of even quality,” Barnard, The Australian Wool Market, 81.
75 Du Plessis, Marketing of Wool, 58–59; Barker and Priestley, Wool Carding and Combing, 69, 105.
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77 Classing prior to auction cost British top makers 15 to 18 pence per 240 pounds (weight) of wool; see Textile Mercury, Wool Year Book, 1915, 93. For classing costs in Australia, see Jeffrey, Geoffrey, The Principles and Practice of Australasian Woolclassing (Adelaide, 1899), 45Google Scholar; and Smith, Henry B., The Sheep and Wool Industry of Australasia (Melbourne, 1917), 89Google Scholar.
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90 See Merrett and Ville, “Institution Building and Variation,” for an account of interselling center differences within Australia.
91 Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail.