Seeking a Global History of Gold

Abstract

This essay focuses on several characteristics central to a global history of nineteenth-century gold rushes: the accelerated mobility of goods, people, and ideas caused by overlapping rushes; the redistributive power of gold-rush gateways; the transition from alluvial to capital-intensive corporate mining; and the shift in technologies and labor regimes that accompanied these thickening transnational networks. Acting in tandem with these processes of global connection and redistribution were a series of powerful counter-currents: the destruction of indigenous communities, the erection and policing of material and mental frontiers from threatening “others,” the protracted consolidation of capital and elaboration of class hierarchies and the rapid but long-term loss of ecological sustainability.

Characterising mine wastes as archaeological landscapes

“…Large‐scale metal mining is a characteristic feature of industrialising economies. Exploitation of gold, silver and base metals including iron, copper, nickel, lead and zinc expanded in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, while industrialised mineral extraction spread with white colonisation to the Americas, Australasia and Africa (Lynch, 2002; Mountford & Tuffnell, 2018). Metal mining has since come to underpin economic development in China, India, Russia, Brazil and other industrialising nations.…”

Global Territorialization and Mining Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Capitalist Anxieties and the Circulation of Knowledge between British and Habsburgian Imperial Spaces, ca. 1820–1850

“…Mining rumors that reached London and Vienna sparked the quest for territorial control in the form of a global gold rush inspired by the discovery of mines in California, Mexico, and Australia. 15 As Mountford and Tuffnell (2018) have emphasized, gold seekers were the creators and products of global interactions that shaped the broader course of nineteenthcentury history. Gold rushes had profound impacts on the territories and societies in which they took place by rapidly mobilizing exchanges of people, knowledge, investment, and technological innovation and stimulating processes of adaptation, capitalist exploitation, and environmental transformation.…”

“…14 Stoler 2002. 15 For their global mining ventures during the mid-nineteenth century, see the 2018 volume edited by Mountford and Tuffnell;and Woodland 2014;Rohrbough 2013;and Randall 1972. demand for mining knowledge and the subsequent mapping of areas with mineral resources, like Minas Gerais, should be understood within the framework of what some scholars have called the territorialization process. According to the geographer Casti, territorialization consists of continuous practices of denomination, reification, and structurization, all of which together imply the intellectual "modelling" of a territory with a view to facilitating physical control and administrative management, and "the creation of operational contexts for the execution of social projects" (2017: 145-49).…”

“…For their global mining ventures during the mid-nineteenth century, see the 2018 volume edited byMountford and Tuffnell;and Woodland 2014;Rohrbough 2013;and Randall 1972. Comparative Studies in Society and History…”

Mining modification of river systems: A case study from the Australian gold rush

“…Water use for metals processing has triggered complex downstream changes in stream dynamics, resulting in waterways reshaped by industrial, geomorphological and hydrological processes (Macklin, ). Gold rushes around the Pacific Rim in the 19th century introduced large‐scale metals mining to regions where it was previously unknown (May, ; Mountford & Tuffnell, ). At the same time, the mining industry drove development of technological advances that increased the scale and efficiency of water use and consequent sediment production.…”