Copper for America: The United States Copper Industry from Colonial Times to the 1990s (review)

In the 1970s, Charles Hyde revolutionized our understanding of the evolution of one of the key sectors of the industrial revolution with his book Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, 1700–1870 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). After excursions into several other historical areas, he returns to the subject of the metals industries in this volume, with a review of the rise and decline of the U.S. copper industry from early colonial times to the present day. On this occasion his approach is less adventurous, seeking primarily to provide a straightforward account of the western-moving frontier of mining and smelting during the nineteenth century and the evolution of the large corporate enterprises that came to dominate it. Copper for America relies on bringing together the existing extensive, but scattered, secondary literature on the subject rather than primary research.

The approach is essentially a regional one. The book starts by considering the neglected foundations of the industry in the East Coast states during the colonial and early national periods. The focus then moves westward in a roughly chronological sequence, looking in turn at the emergent mining and smelting industries of Michigan, Montana, and Arizona. A final section deals with the process of twentieth-century corporate amalgamation and the role of U.S.-based multinationals in both expanding production overseas and adjusting to contraction at home. Throughout the book the emphasis is on entrepreneurial and business history—the men and corporate enterprises that established and came to control the industry—rather than on the technical detail of where and how the mines and smelters were worked. These latter issues are not entirely ignored—there is much useful general comment on the introduction of new technology, the employment system, and, particularly, the complex issues of labor relation—but these are not the main focus of the work, and little that is new and revealing is provided.

The greatest strength of this book is that it fills an important gap in the general literature of American industrial history. Not since T. A. Rickard’s History of American Mining (New York: McGraw Hill, 1932) has anyone attempted a general national history of that industry or any section of it. Regional studies abound, but they rarely include a coherent national overview, and the subject has been largely hidden from general view. Student textbooks of American economic history pay scant attention to mining in any of its forms, and the subject features prominently only in western social and cultural history. This book is an important first step in projecting the subject more widely, though its approach does somewhat militate against its effectiveness for this purpose. For example, the regional approach to the subject means that it is difficult to derive a clear overall picture of the industry’s economic and technical development. Similarly, little help is provided in exploring the degree to which the experience of copper producers is related to other parts of the nonferrous metals sector. This latter issue is particularly important because other evidence tells us that almost every practical aspect of the mining and smelting of copper—the technologies used, the labor force and employment system, management and capital structure, etc.—evolved in a complex symbiotic relationship with the production of lead, silver, gold, and zinc, and any attempt to tell the story of one in the absence of the others must inevitably be flawed. Equally, it is not until we come to the last section of the book, on the performance of the industry in the twentieth century, that we are given much information on the international context within which the industry operated.

Developments here—again particularly in terms of the development of new mining, ore-processing, and smelting technologies—set the economic context in which the industry operated and directly influenced the ores that could be exploited, the corporate structure of...