Racial Capitalism, Scientific Infrastructure and the North American Mineralogical Frontier, 1850-1920

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This session brings together early career researchers thinking about how race was articulated, negotiated and re-made along the extractive mineralogical frontiers of the British empire and its settler colonial off-shoots during the 19th century. The papers in this session engage with scholarly discussions about race, capitalism and scientific infrastructure that have been unfolding within environmental history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, settler colonial studies and science studies since the 1980s. The panel considers how we might methodologically approach, study and write about the history of racial capitalism when we take as our starting point all the mining engineers, public works architects, physical chemists, geologists and other scientific experts who produced new geographies of Anglo-American mineralogical extraction and terraformation during the late 19th and early 20th century. The panelists contend with the ways that geological engineering expertise was recursively re-made through its cumulative re-ordering of land-body relations.

Relying on a range of mining-related archival materials from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico and South Africa from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the panelists inquire: How did scientists working on the expanding mineralogical frontier shape race thinking and practices? How did geochemical research on minerals altered racial conceptions of liberal personhood? How did mining scientists negotiate the pressures to conform to racial modernity as they engaged with the geophilosophical knowledges of Black, racialized, and Indigenous peoples? And how was the exercise of extractive knowledge in these landscapes impacted by the unevenly distributed risks of mining itself? Attending to the relationship between the sciences of mineralogical extraction, the history of racial reformation and global histories of colonialism, this panel presents a diverse set of methodologies and sources to bridge long-standing divides between histories of race and colonialism, and environmental history.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Engineering Care in the American Southwest, 1880-1900 - Sarah-Louise J Dawtry, Northwestern

• “Men Who Love a Fight with Nature”: Mining Engineers and the Necropolitics of Mine Waste in California and South Africa, 1870-1910 - Douglas Jones, York University

• The Geochemistry of Race: Copper-Working and Theories of Racial Difference in Colonial Canada, 1850-1870 - Sajdeep Soomal, University of Toronto

• Commodified Underworlds: Geological Survey of Canada’s Mineral Sets - Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon, Dalhousie University

Chair

• Kathryn Morse, Middlebury College