Volume 57, Issue 1 - Rohstoffräume

Space, and access to resource deposits in particular, is a central theme of studies in economic history. However, new approaches to the theory of space that highlight the relations between people, places and things as constituents of multiple and dynamic spaces, have so far rarely been systematically applied to questions relating to resource economies. By referring to spaces of resource extraction as “sites”, this introductory article develops the notion that spaces in which resources are accessed, distributed and consumed are not a fixed and pregiven category, but exist in dynamic spatial relations. These spatial relations can be made up of perceptions and images, such as geological knowledge or spheres of interests, social structures, such as in the distribution of real-estate property and in power relations, or they can be established by the expansion of infrastructures and by terms of trade. They also pertain to the physical properties of the resources themselves, especially when considering the environmental impact of extraction. All of these spatial relations are highly variable and change historically in interdependence with the dynamics of resource extraction.

From the late 19 th to the late 20 th century, the cities and industries of the world became increasingly reliant on fireproof materials made from asbestos. In focusing on the town of Asbestos, Canada, this paper will show how this process of market boom and bust shaped a fierce local culture rooted in working and living on a rapidly changing environment. By analyzing the successive expansions of the giant mine located in the centre of Asbestos, this paper will highlight how unique understandings of self and place develop in mining communities and form a complex culture rooted in a constantly changing environment.

Limestone, a resource that was needed to smelt iron ore and to produce steel, became an object of competition between industrialists of the Ruhr around 1900. The making and transformation of spatial relations was crucial to the process of gaining exclusive access to the resource. First, images of the underground terrain, namely the identification and delineation of limestone deposits, were variable and subject to negotiation – albeit bound to physical space through procedures of surveying and chemical analysis. Second, the changing structure of real-estate property constituted new spatial relations. As limestone companies bought up property from local farmers, the social implications of land ownership slowly eroded. Instead, the spatial structure of property was reorganized around safeguarding an exclusive and unrestricted access to limestone deposits. Third, the companies' interventions transformed spatial relations by realigning infrastructures and restricting potentially conflicting uses of land. In the end, they also transformed much of the physical space by expanding quarries in unprecedented dimensions. All these processes were driven and shaped in a highly competitive setting in which not only competing companies but also the local populace gained decisive influence. The aim of this case study is to show that space was not a fixed “container” in which companies and locals pursued their economic interests. Rather, spatial relations were brought about, and hence made, amid the competition for the resource as these relations became the precondition for resource extraction.

Focusing on the major flows of gold in early 20 th century offers new perspectives on the various and often overlapping political, sociocultural and economic spaces that are linked to the production, transport, marketing and consumption of gold around the world. A material, but not materialistic, biography of gold helps to overcome the narrow “centrist” logic that still dominates many narratives of globalization as well as the historiography on gold. The paper studies different spatial impacts such as the geology and geographical conditions of the places where gold was found, the newly built infrastructures for energy and water with far-reaching effects, the political segregation of different ethnic groups, the systems of migrant work across national and imperial boundaries, work in mines on the surface and underground, channels of transport, the informal arrangements to direct the international flow of gold towards London, strategies of workers and unionists, the difficult conditions of peasant families in India as well as in South African reserves, and the important question of by whom and from where the global commodity chain of gold may have been directed.

Oil extraction began in the City of Los Angeles in the 1890s and continues to this day. A series of oil booms contributed to the city’s explosive growth in the early twentieth century. Because oil drilling was so dangerous, however, Los Angeles residents and city officials tried repeatedly to regulate oil exploration near homes and businesses. This article explains how oil drilling influenced Los Angeles residents’ understanding of property rights, how damage to residential property in the 1930s finally enabled city officials to pass and enforce limits on oil drilling, and then, how mobilization for World War II undermined those limits.

As an important fuel, hard coal shaped industrialisation. Due to its specific materiality, coal established different options for intertwining industry and resource. This paper concentrates on the one hand on the specific properties of coal and, on the other, on the economic and technological operations with coal. Using the example of the different material properties of coal from the coal districts of Inde and Wurm, these interrelations are examined and illustrate how a space of resource extraction could be arranged.

The article analyses how the salt mining districts of a geographically small but politically divided region covering alpine stretches of today’s Austria and Germany are represented in late 17 th century topographical literature. The way these districts are described and depicted in texts, maps and images of the famous “Topographia Germaniae”, published by Matthäus Merian the Elder and his successors, deepens our understanding of the construction of regionality and the role of materiality and human economic practices in this construction process.

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.

This article analyzes the network of phosphate producing sites in French colonial North Africa in the twentieth century. By tracing phosphate flows across the region between mining sites, and by placing the North African network into imperial and global perspective, the article develops the concept of a phosphate archipelago, capable of recognizing the shared specificities of the phosphate mines as extractive spaces and of describing their insertion into adjacent local and regional dynamics. Drawing on political-economic writings after World War One, the article focuses mainly on phosphates’ role in the colonial politics of economic autarky, but also touches on labour migration, the role of phosphates as an actor, and the trajectory of the phosphate archipelago in North Africa across the watershed of independence in the 1950s and down to the present day, when it plays a key role in the politics of global nutrition and food security.

Cow traction was a major source of energy in the agriculture of various European countries deep into the 1950s. As the losses in milk yields were by far outstripped by energy gains, a great number of continental smallholders preferred cows to horses and oxen regardless of a negative impact on labour productivity. However, the triple use of cows (milk, meat and traction) became widespread only after 1800 in accordance with an increasing availability of fodder resources. In this sense the expansion of cow traction can be considered as that part of the agricultural revolution which contributed to the protracted survival of smallholder economies in countries like Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany and Switzerland.

There is no doubt that industrialization was the main cause of modern economic welfare. The reasons for more or less industrialization in various regions of the world have been discussed widely for decades. However, a closer examination reveals that none of the controversial arguments and explanations put forward stand the test of empirical scrutiny. What has previously been ignored is the central role of large cities in provoking industrialization. Given all the other preconditions necessary for industrialization, it was finally the mass markets of large cities that made industrial mass production profitable for potential entrepreneurs. Thus, wherever large cities and urban agglomerations emerged in the world, industrialization followed suit. In a global and comparative perspective, industrialization was not so much a matter of countries but rather a matter of regions dividing the world into highly urbanized, industrialized and more prosperous regions on the one side, and still primarily rural, preindustrial and poorer regions on the other..

This article investigates the Reich Economic Aid (“ Reichswirtschaftshilfe” ) which offered state-guaranteed bank loans to companies in Alsace, Lorraine and the Saar region from 1940 onwards. Following the French defeat, these companies suffered from a lack of capital. This lack was caused by the evacuations of the border region at the beginning of the Second World War and war destruction. First, the article examines the political and legal conditions of the Reichswirtschaftshilfe in the Altreich and the annexed regions. This contribution then focuses on Alsace and Lorraine. It is examined how the loans granted in Strasbourg and Metz reflected German economic policies pursued in annexed territories, ranging from material reconstruction to ideological reorganization of the local economies.