Ralph Shlomowitz has degrees from the University of Cape Town, the University of the Witwatersrand, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Chicago where Robert W. Fogel supervised his PhD dissertation. His research focussed on the economic history of coercive labour systems in the southern states of the USA, in Australia, and the Pacific, and the link between migration and mortality among many free and coerced migrant populations. He taught at Flinders University from 1975 to 2007. In 2004 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.