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Mining Tycoons in the Age of Empire, 1870-1945: Entrepreneurship, High Finance, Politics and Territorial Expansion. Edited by Raymond E. Dumett. Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2009. xv + 255 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $114.95. ISBN: 978-0-754-66303-4.
Reviewed by Maury Klein
This collection features nine essays and a cogent introduction by the editor, who also contributes one of the articles. As the title suggests, it uses the careers of several prominent men to get at the themes listed in the subtitle. The tycoons who forged business empires in mining are a mixed group of familiar and lesser-known figures: Horace Tabor, Edward Cade and Frederick Gordon, Cecil Rhodes, John T. North, Whitaker Wright, Frank Morrill Murphy, Claudio Albo de Bernales, the Guggenheim brothers (themselves a group of seven), and Alfred Chester Beatty.
Mining as a big business developed on a broad international stage. This group of men alone created companies that mined gold, silver, copper, diamonds, and nitrates in the United States, British Columbia, Mexico, Chile, Africa, and western Australia. Their presence disrupted local cultures, transformed social, political, and economic systems, advanced imperialism, touched off occasional orgies of speculation, and spurred the development of new extractive and processing technologies to increase output. By the early twentieth century, their efforts had done much to make mining a major global industry, often at heavy cost to the indigenous peoples who had the misfortune to occupy land rich with mineral resources.
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