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5 Rare Earths: The Cold War in the Annals of Travancore Itty Abraham The Political Economy of Rare Earths In a way it begins with semantic confusion. So-called rare earths were “rare” because it was assumed that these naturally forming mineral-laden compounds were scarce and hard to find.1 It didn’t mean they were valuable —though economists are quick to assume the identity of scarcity and value—at least not until two independent transformations of rare earths took place, each giving new meanings and value to particular rare earths. But before we get there, it also turns out that rare earths aren’t really that scarce after all. This nomenclature is a symptom of the geo-historical origins of modern chemistry. In Europe in the nineteenth century, when rare earths were named, these compounds were found in only a few places, notably Sweden, hence they were assumed to be rare. Later on, their rarity could be associated with their place in the periodic table, since most rare earths are in the lanthanide group, which were among the last elements to be identified. Semantic confusion also doesn’t imply unimportance. Once named rare it was assumed that they were, in terms of value; perhaps counter-intuitively, this feeling was most pronounced in places where such minerals are relatively abundant. The southwest coast of India is one such place. Between the coastal towns of Kollam (formerly Quilon) and Nagercoil in the former princely state of Travancore (today’s Kerala) lies a huge concentration of monazite beach sands. Monazite is a phosphate compound composed of a number of rare earth elements. Among the elements found in monazite is thorium, which is radioactive.2 The official history of rare earths in Kerala begins innocently in 1908–09 when a German chemist, C. W. Shomberg, “chanced upon a few yellowish-green particles in some material from South India.”3 The first mining lease for monazite was granted to the London Cosmopolitan Mining Company, which, notwithstanding its name, was controlled by 102 Abraham German interests. By 1911, the bulk of extraction activities were carried out by two British companies: the Travancore Minerals Company and Hopkins and Williams Limited.4 Travancore’s rare earths first became valuable when they moved from scientific curiosity to industrial use. Monazite was used in the manufacture of gas mantles, a form of incandescent lighting based on chemical rather than electrical power. The mantle is composed of thorium nitrate and other salts: when heated by a flame, these salts oxidize and give off an intense white light. The gas mantle lamp was invented by the Austro-Hungarian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach, (1858–1929), a student of Robert Bunsen, after his chemical studies of the properties of rare earths in the late nineteenth century.5 The gas-mantle lamp, which was in competition with early forms of electrical lighting, received a patent at the time when municipalities in Europe were beginning to invest in better street lighting. This ensured the commercial success of this product and set off a global scramble for rare earths that would eventually lead to the realization that these minerals were not so rare as once thought. The demand for monazite rose steadily through the 1910s. Thanks to their political control of India, with its huge reserves of monazite, British firms had a lock on the supply of raw monazite to lighting companies all over Western Europe and North America. German firms, on the other hand, controlled the basic patents to manufacture thorium nitrate and “limited [the industry] to a very narrow circle in order to prevent competition.”6 The production of monazite rose steadily until the end of World War I, when the market crashed. The reason is explained by a technical advisor to the British Ministry of Supply: “It is doubtful that there can be any great expansion in the output of monazite until some [other] outlet is found. . . . The chief cause of the slump may be put down to the general decline in the use of gas as an illuminating agent.”7 Electricity and electric light had taken the place of gas and incandescent lamps far quicker than had been anticipated. The demand for monazite as an industrial input would be marked by acute fluctuations for the rest of the century, the first indication of its unreliability as a material ally. The second transformation of rare earths came a half-century later when it became known that thorium was a potential nuclear...

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