‘Gold mirrors capitalism — its mines echo with hardship and ecological harm’

Stephen Tuffnell is Associate Professor of Modern United States History at Oxford University. Speaking to Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke , he discusses how gold shaped the modern world:
You’ve co-edited ‘A Global History of Gold Rushes’ — which are some profound ones?
■ California is one of the most important — it fires the starting gun for a series of rushes that continued uninterrupted until Klondike which ended at the turn of the 20 th century. Of course, gold was mined for millennia before that but California was the first phenomenon characterised by the mass movement of people around the world. Americans came there from the east coast but some of the earliest people to reach were also Peruvians, Australians and Chinese miners from Shandong province. ‘Rushing’ developed into an economic practice and a cultural idea and the technology also changed then — until then, there was alluvial mining or removing gold flakes from riverbeds. By 1853, a highly capital-intensive phase began and the industrialisation of mining started.

The other goldrush I’d mention was in southern Africa, where such capitalisation took on a new form. There, gold flakes were spread through a very complex ore body. Extraction required chemicals, processing plants and large amounts of capital — we then see the globalisation of ‘mass mining’ or taking out as much earth as possible and processing it with chemicals, etc.

Image Courtesy: Library of Congress via S. Tuffnell

ALL THAT GLITTERS... The mining of gold has meant the tearing down of entire mountains and jungles, the blasting of rock, the bleaching of ore with hazardous chemicals and their leaching into rivers, reaching animals and humans with deadly impacts (Photos: Getty & iStock)
Did these movements change communities?
■ In California, when the rush began, the port that was San Francisco was just a community of around 800 people — it mushroomed into 10,000 within two years and that’s just the people who stayed there. There were hundreds of thousands transiting through it. A ‘gold rush community’ developed rapidly, then moved into the gold regions.

Some of the most direct consequences were on the indigenous communities living in these gold regions — they were already suffering a decline after Spanish colonisation but the gold rush accelerated that enormously, in part because of the destruction of indigenous ways of life and the environments upon which they depended. Gold mining meant the degradation of rivers, large movements of earth and deforestation. And then, genocidal violence occurred in California, especially against indigenous groups like the Yuki Indians. There was a dramatic population decline, replaced by this Anglo mining community that began defining itself around ideas of white republicanism — it enacted things like the Foreign Miners’ Tax Act in 1850 to push out migrants like the Chinese and create a kind of white American republic on the shores of the Pacific.

In Southern Africa, the discovery of gold transitioned into British settler colonialism — the mines started drawing migrants from far away into compounds where they were housed, searched daily and subjected to a regime of racial management by white foremen and engineers. This was the origin of the liquor laws, restrictions on travel and other discriminations that become central to the Apartheid state. The mass transfer of Anglo miners transformed this colony into a powerful part of the idea of white settler dominions in the British empire.

How did technologies and processes of capitalism evolve?
■ In California, the pick, pan and shovels of the early alluvial phase transitioned into hydraulic mining — that needed iron, industrial nozzles and the deforestation of large parts of Sierra Nevada and other areas of California for the wood and flumes rivers were diverted into, so they could wash out rock from gold and amalgamate it with mercury. This needed massive funding — so, San Francisco rapidly became a sort of capital in the American West and a local elite established around gold developed, although, ironically, the state itself was a debtor — all the gold was leaving and finding its way into the Bank of England, which was keen to keep raw gold to peg the pound to the international gold standard.

You thus see the early seeds of a gold mining capitalism in California — when you reach South Africa, you see the gold rushes have become as much a race for the money that can be made on the stock exchange in London as to actually extract gold from the ground. There was booming company formation in London then, with enterprises claiming they could extract gold and make large profits. But they were really vehicles for speculation, booms and bubbles — that transformed cultures of risk in the capitalist world. Previously, the mine itself was the gamble — you’d go to diggings and may or may not strike it rich. But 30 years on, the culture of risk around mining became centred on the stock market, normalising investing in shares, speculation and industries which formed part of high financial capitalism.

A SOLID ASSET: Central banks store up gold
What ecological impacts did this gold frenzy cause?
■ In the early rushes like California, Victoria and Australia, the destruction of landscapes was phenomenal — environments were entirely overturned. Miners themselves said they resembled ‘moonscapes’, denuded of flora and fauna and riverbeds diverted. In California, hydraulic mining washed away mountains, filling rivers with slurry and rock — this set in motion California’s current politics of water and consequences like wildfires.

TRAPPED UNDER: Gold mining also gave rise to many practices of Apartheid
Another extremely destructive aspect was the use of mercury for gold extraction — that reached rivers and there are still advisories, suggesting people don’t eat fish from these because the mercury causes health problems. Meanwhile, a lot of cyanidation was used in South Africa, where high concentrations of cyanide dissolved rock into a kind of sand. The waste was put behind dams — but often, there were spillages and seepage. Also, in abandoned mines, water built up and eventually, when it flowed into rivers, mass perishings of fish and other animals occurred.

Were miners themselves mixed?
■ Yes, these were incredibly diverse populations. They tended to be dominated by Britons and Americans. But there were other Europeans, and large numbers of Chinese — they’ve been depicted as ‘coolie labourers’, indentured miners, etc. Actually, they were often voluntary migrants, working in companies together as a collective enterprise. California also had black Americans and indigenous miners. In South Africa, the workforce in mines tended to be black Africans and the supervisors, white Europeans or Americans — extreme forms of racialisation took place. But even then, in response to a decline in employment of black Africans, they imported Chinese miners. A social consequence of this movement of Chinese workers to mines was the rise of ideas around ‘restriction’ heard in the US, Australia and London or stopping the migration of non-whites around the world. Those notions of gatekeeping, connected to migration, were linked to gold mining. Meanwhile, mining attracted non-miners too — a ‘gold rush outfitters’ started in San Francisco where a German Jewish migrant made a fortune selling denim to miners, servicing gold rushes rather than engaging in mining itself.

Do societies which went out actively seeking gold, like the US or China, differ in history from those who didn’t send their people looking for it?
■ Gold partly helps us understand why certain regions of the world were plugged into a kind of global economy earlier than others. By the late 19th century, this industry required the movement of enormous personnel, capital and goods. Gold is part of the story of how ideas about capitalism connected to concepts like economic development and how some industries promised jobs and growth from resource extraction.