The first book to detail the global impact of copper production in
Swansea, Wales, and how a major technological shift transformed the
British Isles into the world's most dynamic center of copper
smelting. 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.
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