Copper and the evolution of space in high modernist America and Japan
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Timothy James LeCain
Timothy James LeCain is an associate professor of history at Montana State University, USA. His first book,Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet , was awarded the American Society for Environmental History's best book prize for 2010. He is currently finishing a book,The Matter of History , that develops a neo-materialist theory and method of historical investigation. It will be published by Cambridge University Press.
Abstract
This essay makes a neo-materialist analysis of the extraction and use of copper in the first half of the twentieth century, using two sites as empirical examples, one American and the other Japanese. By moving beyond the modernist dichotomies that separate mine and city, nature and technology, and the “natural” and built environment, I argue that copper has played a central role in creating modern human spatial relationships and associated cultures. I offer two specific examples. First, the extraction of copper and the resulting pollution challenged the modern capitalist idea that material things could be abstracted into idealized commodities of exchange that were spatially distinct from their places of origin and each other. In actual historical practice, though, this abstracted space of global commodity exchange was repeatedly undermined by local spaces where real commodities often interacted in unanticipated ways. Second, once this extracted copper was formed into far-flung networks of wires, it challenged earlier spatial concepts in which the burning of coal or other energy-rich materials had always occurred very near to the site where the resulting power would be used. By creating what Manuel Castells’ terms a “space of flow” in which power could be instantaneously transmitted over long distances, copper wires created the illusion of an immaterial and even placeless source of power. Ironically, though, this immaterial illusion could only be sustained by surrounding humans with large amounts of very real copper wires. In both of these examples, the extraction and use of copper shaped human space and societies in unanticipated ways, challenging the modernist assumption that humans could fully understand and control the material things they extracted from nature and embedded in their built environments.
About the author
Timothy James LeCain is an associate professor of history at Montana State University, USA. His first book, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet, was awarded the American Society for Environmental History's best book prize for 2010. He is currently finishing a book, The Matter of History, that develops a neo-materialist theory and method of historical investigation. It will be published by Cambridge University Press.
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Abhandlungen
- Rohstoffräume. Räumliche Relationen und das Wirtschaften mit Rohstoffen
- Abhandlungen
- International agency over local land: Mine expansion and industrial priorities in the Town of Asbestos, Canada
- Abhandlungen
- Konkurrenz um Kalkstein. Rohstoffsicherung der Montanindustrie und die Dynamik räumlicher Relationen um 1900
- Abhandlungen
- Raum und Macht – Eine Stoffgeschichte des Goldes im frühen 20. Jahrhundert
- Abhandlungen
- Extracting property values and oil: Los Angeles’ petroleum booms and the definition of urban space in the twentieth century
- Abhandlungen
- Vom Rohstoff zum Produkt. Wirtschaftliche und technische Verflechtungen von Steinkohlen im Inde- und Wurmrevier
- Abhandlungen
- Salzregionen. Der sozionaturale Schauplatz Bergbau in der topografischen Beschreibung der Frühen Neuzeit
- Abhandlungen
- Copper and the evolution of space in high modernist America and Japan
- Abhandlungen
- The phosphate archipelago: Imperial mining and global agriculture in French North Africa
- Forschungs- und Literaturbericht
- Kuhanspannung in Mitteleuropa: Ein vergessenes Element der Agrarrevolution?
- Forschungs- und Literaturbericht
- Mit der Großstadt aus der Armut: Eine neue Theorie der Industrialisierung
- Forschungs- und Literaturbericht
- Kredite für den Wiederaufbau. Die Reichswirtschaftshilfe in der Saarpfalz, in Lothringen und im Elsass, 1940-1942
