Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West

Earth Science and Extractive Capitalism in the Age of Empire

“…To be sure, this is hardly the first attempt to connect the earth sciences to mining and other forms of extractive industry. Classic work by Roy Porter (Porter 1977), Ted Porter (Porter 1981), Stephen Turner (Turner 1987), and William Goetzmann (Goetzmann 1978), as well as more recent contributions by James Secord (Secord 2018(Secord , 1986, Paul Lucier (Lucier 2008, Shellen Wu (Wu 2015), and Simon Knell (Knell 2000(Knell , 2012, all place the history of geology squarely within an economic context. At the same time, another strand in the literature primarily focuses on intellectual history, sometimes going so far as to argue that theoretical debates in geology and paleontology are completely divorced from politics and economics (Parsons 2001).…”

“…By publicizing the location, extent, and abundance of the continent's valuable resources for economic extraction, they also incentivized white settlers to physically colonize large swaths of territory wherein the United States had only nominal power. To that end, the first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a concerted effort to map the entirety of North America (Goetzmann 1978;Short 2001;Schwartz 1980). Besides the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, much of this work was done by geological surveys, which were initially organized on a state-by-state basis.…”