About the conference

Keynote speakers:

Professor Katy Barnett, University of Melbourne
Professor Sundhya Pahuja, University of Melbourne
Professor Andreas Thier, University of Zurich

Plenary panel:

‘Currency and sovereignty: material(ist) histories of money in Aotearoa and Australia’

Hannah Forsyth, Adjunct Associate Professor of History, University of New England and author of Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870-2008
Mike Beggs, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy, University of Sydney
Catherine Comyn, PhD Candidate in International Political Economy, King’s College London
Ben Huf, Whitlam Institute

Conference theme

'Currency':

1. that which is current as a medium of exchange; the money in actual use.
2. the fact or quality of being passed on, as from person to person.
3. general acceptance; prevalence; vogue.
4. the fact or state of passing in time.
5. circulation, as of coin.
6. someone born in Australia (opposed to sterling).
   (Macquarie Dictionary)

While legal historians look to the past, they are also deeply concerned with currency.  They are interested in how ideas, stories, legal concepts, and legal doctrines gain and lose currency at different times and in different places. The 2025 conference theme invites consideration of ‘currency’, in every sense, in the context of law and history.

Some conference streams will focus specifically on ‘currency’ in its monetary sense. As historian Katie A. Moore writes, ‘money has always been socially constructed, historically conditioned, and culturally specific.’ Over the past two decades, interdisciplinary scholarship has increasingly focussed on money, in its political, cultural, legal and material forms. In the field of legal history, this development has coincided with a decisive turn towards transnational and comparative work, including a new attention to imperial legal networks.

This work has shown how transnational flows of credit and debt supported both the economic and the epistemological projects of empire. Along with bankers, brokers and merchants, colonial lawyers played a central role in facilitating the international and intranational circulation of money.  Through legal innovations such as the joint-stock company, they enhanced settler-colonists’ access to capital.  In this way, they enabled both the generation of colonial wealth and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

This conference invites participants to explore various forms of ‘currency’, including:

• Ideas of legal innovation, modernity and temporality, in different cultural contexts, geographical settings and historical periods;
• The law’s engagement with money, in its material and symbolic forms, and capitalism more broadly; and
• Indigenous peoples’ relationships with financial and legal change, from Invasion to the present.