Contents

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents ix
3. List of Illustrations xi
4. Preface xiii
5. Editors’ Acknowledgments xv
6. Timeline and Map: Selected Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes xix
7. Part One. Global Transformations in the Age of Gold
8. 1. Seeking a Global History of Gold 3
9. 2. California, Coincidence, and Empire 42
10. Part Two. Settler Societies and Gold Rush Democracy
11. 3. Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes 65
12. 4. The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Struggle for Order 88
13. 5. The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, 1849–1910 109
14. Part Three. Finance, Speculation, and the Economics of Gold Rushes
15. 6. Frenzied Finance: Gold Mining in the Globalizing South, circa 1886–1896 139
16. 7. Dreams of a “Johannesburg of West Africa”: Th e Gold Coast’s Moment in the Imperial Rush for Gold 163
17. 8. Creating a Global Industry? Geology, Capital, and Company Formation on the Goldfields of the Industrial Age 184
18. Part Four. Expertise, the Environment, and Mining Technologies
19. 9. The Real Wealth of the World: Hydraulic Mining and the Environment in the Circum-Pacific Goldfields 209
20. 10. Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanics of Global Connectivity 229
21. 11. Grounding Capitalism: Geology, Labor, and the Nome Gold Rush 252
22. Select Bibliography 273
23. List of Contributors 303
24. Index 307