ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The UMHK on Broadway: Writing the Uranium Business into the Global Nuclear Histories

• In Event: Nuclear History as Global History: Current Debates and New Perspectives 1

English Abstract

This intervention foregrounds the global role of extractive enterprise in the making of the Manhattan Project. By focusing on the Belgian company, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK), that was registered as African Metals Company on Broadway in New York City, this essay traces the US government’s wartime and postwar efforts through Belgian business and state actors to procure access to Congolese uranium from the Shinkolobwe mine of Katanga. It emphasizes the need for global histories of capitalism with an emphasis on extractivism in dependent spaces connected to nuclear fission.

Author

• Jayita Sarkar