Evans, Chris (Author)
Miskell, Louise (Author)
Johns Hopkins University Press
Physical Details: 243
Language: English
Eighteenth-century Swansea, Wales, was to copper what nineteenth-century Manchester was to cotton or twentieth-century Detroit to the automobile. Beginning around 1700, Swansea became the place where a revolutionary new method of smelting copper, later christened the Welsh Process, flourished. Using mineral coal as a source of energy, Swansea's smelters were able to produce copper in volumes that were quite unthinkable in the old, established smelting centers of central Europe and Scandinavia. After some tentative first steps, the Swansea district became a smelting center of European, then global, importance. Between the 1770s and the 1840s, the Swansea district routinely produced one-third of the world's smelted copper, sometimes more.In Swansea Copper, Chris Evans and Louise Miskell trace the history of copper making in Britain from the late seventeenth century, when the Welsh Process transformed Britain's copper industry, to the 1890s, when Swansea's reign as the dominant player in the world copper trade entered an absolute decline. Moving backward and forward in time, Evans and Miskell begin by examining the place of copper in baroque Europe, surveying the productive landscape into which Swansea Copper erupted and detailing the means by which it did so. They explain how Swansea copper achieved global dominance in the years between the Seven Years' War and Waterloo, explore new commercial regulations that allowed the importation to Britain of copper ore from around the world, and connect the rise of the copper trade to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade. They also examine the competing rise of the post–Civil War US copper industry.Whereas many contributions to global history focus on high-end consumer goods—Chinese ceramics, Indian cottons, and the like—Swansea Copper examines a producer good, a metal that played a key role in supporting new technologies of the industrial age, like steam power and electricity. Deftly showing how deeply mineral history is ingrained in the history of the modern world, Evans and Miskell present new research not just on Swansea itself but on the places its copper industry affected: mining towns in Cuba, Chile, southern Africa, and South Australia. This insightful book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the historical roots of globalization and the Industrial Revolution as a global phenomenon.
...MoreReview Espen Storli (Summer 2023) Review of "Swansea Copper: A Global History". Business History Review (pp. 432-434).
Review Gianenrico Bernasconi (January 2022) Review of "Swansea Copper: A Global History". Technology and Culture (pp. 255-257).
Similar Citations
Article
Evans, Chris;
Saunders, Olivia;
(2015)
A World of Copper: Globalizing the Industrial Revolution, 1830--70
Article
Radivojević, Miljana;
Rehren, Thilo;
Kuzmanović-Cvetković, Julka;
Jovanović, Marija;
Northover, J. Peter;
(2013)
Tainted Ores and the Rise of Tin Bronzes in Eurasia, c. 6500 Years Ago
Book
Trinder, Barrie Stuart;
(2013)
Britain's Industrial Revolution: The Making of a Manufacturing People, 1700--1870
Book
Peter Wakelin;
(2015)
The Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal: World Heritage Site
Article
Robert C. Allen;
(2019)
Class structure and inequality during the industrial revolution: Lessons from England's social tables, 1688–1867
Article
Wang, Wenzhi;
Mei, Jianjun;
(2009)
A Preliminary Study of “Kodo Zuroku”
Book
Barbara Hahn;
(2020)
Technology in the Industrial Revolution
Article
Friedrich Frhr. Waitz von Eschen;
(2020)
Carl Zumbe – Montanexperte in braunschweigischen und hessen-kasselischen Diensten. Fallstudie zur praktischen Verwissenschaftlichung des Montanwesens um 1700 (Carl Zumbe, Mining Expert in the Services of Brunswick and Hessian Cassel. A Case Study on the Practical Scientification of the Mining Sector)
Article
Nuala Zahedieh;
(2021)
Eric Williams and William Forbes: copper, colonial markets, and commercial capitalism
Book
Chris Evans;
Louise Miskell;
(2020)
Swansea copper : A global history
Thesis
Kristen Michelle Schranz;
(2018)
A New Narrative for "Keir's Metal": The Chemical and Commercial Transformations of James Keir's Copper Alloy, 1770-1820
Article
Marcuson, W;
Baksa, D.;
(2013)
Colonel Robert Means Thompson and Noak Victor Hybinette: A Tale of Yin and Yang
Book
Humbertclaude, Eric;
(2010)
Federico Gualdi à Venise: fragments retrouvés (1660--1678): recherches sur un exploitant minier alchimiste
Article
Kraschewski, Hans-Joachim;
(2018)
Gestübbe und Nasenschmelzen
Article
Hudgins, Carter C.;
(2007)
Chemistry, Copper and Colonization: The Role of Non-ferrous Metallurgy in the Settlement of Jamestown, Virginia (c. 1607--1610)
Article
Hudgins, Carter C.;
(2005)
Articles of Exchange or Ingredients of New World Metallurgy? An Examination of the Industrial Origins and Metallurgical Functions of Scrap Copper at Early Jamestown (c. 1607--17)
Book
William J. Ashworth;
(2017)
The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade
Article
Nuvolari, Alessandro;
Tartari, Valentina;
(2011)
Bennet Woodcroft and the value of English patents, 1617--1841
Chapter
Regine MATHIAS;
(2020)
Knowledge on Mining and Smelting and Its Dissemination in the Edo Period
Article
Peer Vries;
(2022)
Patrick O’Brien on industrialization, little Britain and the wider world
Be the first to comment!