Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.
Edited by:
Benjamin Mountford,
Stephen Tuffnell
Imprint: University of California Press
Country of Publication: United States
Volume: 25
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 28mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9780520294547
ISBN 10: 0520294548
Series: California World History Library
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 16 October 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Illustrations Preface John Darwin and Jay Sexton Editors’ Acknowledgments Timeline and Map: Selected Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes part one global transformations in the age of gold 1 • Seeking a Global History of Gold Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuff nell 2 • California, Coincidence, and Empire Elliott West part two settler societies and gold rush democracy 3 • Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Rushes David Goodman 4 • The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Struggle for Order Benjamin Mountford 5 • The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, 1849–1910 Mae M. Ngai part three finance, speculation, and the economics of gold rushes 6 • Frenzied Finance: Gold Mining in the Globalizing South, circa 1886–1896 Ian Phimister 7 • Dreams of a “Johannesburg of West Africa”: The Gold Coast’s Moment in the Imperial Rush for Gold Cassandra Mark-Thiesen 8 • Creating a Global Industry? Geology, Capital, and Company Formation on the Goldfields of the Industrial Age Erik Eklund part four expertise, the environment, and mining technologies 9 • The Real Wealth of the World: Hydraulic Mining and the Environment in the Circum-Pacific Goldfields Andrew C. Isenberg 10 • Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanics of Global Connectivity Stephen Tuffnell 11 • Grounding Capitalism: Geology, Labor, and the Nome Gold Rush Bathsheba Demuth Select Bibliography List of Contributors Index
Benjamin Mountford, Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, is the author of Britain, China, and Colonial Australia and coeditor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2017-18). Stephen Tuffnell, Associate Professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford, is currently completing Emigrant Foreign Relations: Independence and Interdependence in the Atlantic, c. 1789–1902. He researches US history from a global perspective.
Reviews for A Global History of Gold Rushes
This collection moves the study of migration, finance, and technology forward in consistently strong essays that are as readable as they are informative. * H-Net *
