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Engineering inter-imperialism: American miners and the transformation of global mining, 1871–1910*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Stephen Tuffnell*
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Merton Street, Oxford, OX1 4JF, UK E-mail: stephen.tuffnell@history.ox.ac.uk

Abstract

This article examines the transnational circulation of American mine engineers between the United States, southern Africa, and the Americas in the late nineteenth century. Technology and knowledge was diffused worldwide with the circulation of American engineers who styled themselves as expert race managers as they compared the labour practices of mines across the world. The article's focus is the extension of the United States’ global footprint to South Africa, where an expatriate ‘colony’ of American engineers created a resilient form of Anglo-American inter-imperial collaboration. As they worked the Rand, American engineers made transnational comparisons of South African and North and South American mines. In the process, they led a global discussion of the efficiency of mining labour that reified white management of other races. After leaving the Rand, American engineers migrated across the globe, many to Mexico, where the interwoven networks of expert knowledge, industrial capitalism, and transnational race-making that characterized late nineteenth-century global mining followed.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

For their careful reading, critical insights, and advice, the author would like to thank Jay Sexton, Pekka Hämäläinen, Michelle Hay, and the editors and anonymous readers of the Journal of Global History. Helpful audiences at the University of Oxford, the British American Nineteenth Century Historians Conference at Rice University, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations annual meeting shaped early versions of this article. The British Academy's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship provided research funding essential for its completion.

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