The City of Gold: The Ecology of Gold in Northeastern Antioquia, 1880–1900

• In Event: Telling Environmental Histories of Capitalism through Commodities

Abstract

In 1881 Colombia was the fourth largest gold exporter. Although mining was performed in Colombia since colonial times, capitalist extraction only started in the nineteenth century when the gold rushes of California, Australia, Brazil and Colombia were concurrent with global controversies about the adoption of the silver or gold standard for currency, new technologies for mineral extraction circulating, and the consolidation of capitalist visions of the natural world. Mines located in Antioquia, a key region of Colombia, have been explored, worked and abandoned periodically for more than 500 years and many of them are still being exploited. This paper discusses the formation of a modern mining capitalistic enterprise guided by a strong discourse of dominion over the insalubrious nature and unruly labor force, and the regional and national changes that gold brought to the region. I analyze mining through the lenses of environmental history to understand the role of gold during the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth century in the consolidation of the state, the creation of new settlement frontiers, and the daily lives of numerous people in the mining regions. My research focuses on the interrelationship between transnational material production of gold during a mining boom at the end of the nineteenth century and the local environmental, social, and technological transformations of one of the most important mining zones, the current northeastern sub-region of Antioquia. I examine the transformation of the ecology of gold with the arrival of foreign companies in the 1850s. Previous mining towns whose superficial resources were depleted by the time of the gold rush shifted to agriculture to supply the new mining centers, new towns emerged, and, as some scarce memoirs and novels of the time reveal, there were several changes in the everyday life of the people living in the region.

Author

• Lorena Campuzano Duque, Doctoral Student