Industrialization, Metal Mining, and Quantum Leaps in Environmental Impacts: Setting the Stage for the Twentieth Century, 1880-1920

• In Event: Knowing Mines in North America: Memory, Science, and the Environment since 1900

Abstract

In the first years of the twentieth century, there was a sudden spike in lawsuits filed in several states (Tennessee, Montana, Utah, Idaho, California) against mining companies because of damage the industry’s operations was causing to crops, livestock, and forest resources. This paper puts those lawsuits in the context of industrialization, which in the late nineteenth century was beginning to accelerate the growth in metals production in the U.S. and elsewhere. Although the Industrial Revolution is widely said to have begun around 1750 in Britain and 1800 in the U.S., economic historians and historians of technology note that it took several decades for industrialization to take root fully in those economies and yield the rapid changes in urbanization, productivity, employment, and living standards for which industrialization is known. This paper explores that history by looking at growth in production for each of the base metals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then by reflecting on the impacts that growth in metals production had on people and other living things that happened to share environmental spaces with mining enterprises.

The great acceleration in metals output in the late nineteenth century set the stage for continued acceleration and the geographical spread of economic growth globally in the twentieth century, despite the disruptions of world wars and economic depression. This paper puts rates of change in the context of conclusions about large-scale economic growth and capital accumulation recently published by Thomas Piketty (Capital in the 21st Century) and Robert Gordon (The Rise and Fall of Growth in America). Growth in metals production led to various ways of knowing mines by capitalists and by miners and smelterworkers; this paper begins and concludes by focusing on what an often overlooked community of interest, farmers, came to know about mines because of industrialization.

Author

• Fredric Quivik, Michigan Technological University