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A World of Copper: Santiago Workshop

A World of Copper held its concluding workshop at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile in April 2013, with the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust’s International Network Scheme.

The workshop opened with a two papers that offered wide-ranging reflections on the project’s themes. Professor Luis Ortega, our host in Santiago, gave a presentation on ‘The "copper moment" of Chile's Norte Chico in Historical Perspective’, situating copper extraction in the mid nineteenth-century Chilean north within a larger pattern of national development. Taking a still broader canvas, Göran Rydén (Uppsala University) argued that metals can provide an indispensable analytical lens through which to view the transition from early modernity to modernity. Rydén’s paper, ‘Diversity and change: metal making from early modernity to modernity’, disputed the recent historiographical emphasis on textiles, especially cotton, as driving global modernity and pointed instead to the polyvalent nature of metals and metallic wares: they could be producer goods, consumer goods and specie.

The next session turned to more detailed explorations of the marketing of ore and other furnace materials. Manuel Llorca (Universidad de Santiago de Chile) spoke on ‘Chilean exports of copper to Wales during the nineteenth century: their impact on the Chilean and Welsh economies’. His careful use of British Parliamentary Papers revealed the mid nineteenth-century world of copper was not wholly centred on Swansea. Indeed, Welsh smelters relied on Chilean furnace materials in quite specific forms and at quite specific times. Likewise, the markets for Chilean ore and smelted copper were very varied. Tehmina Goskar also made scrupulous use of complicated evidence in her paper ‘Smelter's choice: ticketings and ore purchasing in Cornwall and Swansea, 1829-34’. By exploiting a very rare set of ‘ticketing’ papers from the archive of the Swansea firm Williams & Grenfell, she was able to unravel the ore procurement practices of British smelters, revealing the interplay of foreign and domestic ores and the extent of collusion between buyers.

A session devoted to the role of shipping in the World of Copper commenced with Robert Protheroe Jones of the National Museum Wales: ‘Smelters, shippers and statistics: attempting to quantify the Welsh dimension of the nineteenth century global trade in copper’. Protheroe Jones drew a sharp distinction between the tonnage of raw materials (the traditional focus of maritime historians) and contained copper content, which actually governed the behaviour of shippers and smelters. Only ores with a high-copper content could justify carriage over very long distances. However, materials with a modest copper content, like cupreous pyrites, could play a role within British smelting because they yielded marketable by-products such as sulphuric acid. Des Cowman (Mining Heritage Trust of Ireland) and John Morris (University of Bristol) presented complementary papers – Cowman on the evidence of ore shipments and sales to be found in The Cambrian, Swansea’s newspaper, and Morris on Swansea’s copper barque fleet and the connections that it forged with other ports, especially those in Ireland.

The workshop’s first day concluded with a report from Steve Hughes (Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales) on work towards a ‘World Heritage Study of Copperworks’ that could be adopted by The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH). The World of Copper network is to constitute the ‘expert group’ behind such a study.

The session on Wednesday, 10 April, began with papers by Huw Bowen (Swansea University) and Luz Maria Mendez (Universidad de Chile). Bowen stressed the enduring importance of Asian markets, managed over many decades by the East India Company, for the Welsh copper industry. This, he suggested, was of a piece with the general character of Welsh industrialization, which relied heavily on external markets. Bowen stressed continuity; Mendez, by contrast, spoke of a rupture in Chile’s mineral exports in the early nineteenth century. In the colonial era silver was pre-eminent and was transported over the Andes by mule train, and then across the pampas to Buenos Aires. In the nineteenth century that changed. Copper ore and metallic copper assumed a greater importance and exports were now funnelled via Pacific Coast ports rather than the trans-Andean trails of former days. One such port, Los Vilos in Coquimbo province, was examined by Igor Goicovic (Universidad de Santiago de Chile). The port, once a quiet inlet, grew smartly after 1850 thanks to copper mining in its hinterland, but the port’s fate was not wholly dependent on copper. Activity on other parts of the coast, especially in the nitrate zone to the north, strongly affected the fortunes of Los Vilos. A quite different perspective on mining in the Norte Chico was provided by Jorge Pinto (Universidad de la Frontera). Pinto focused on the relationship between harsh realities and popular mentalities in the mining districts. Miners were fatalistic: resigned to hardship and suffering, yet irrepressibly hopeful of the one big mineral strike that would make them rich.

Not the least of the hardships encountered by the inhabitants of mining districts was environmental pollution. The toxic outputs associated with the copper industry were analysed by Tim LeCain (Montana State University) who compared the impact of smelting in Butte, Montana, and the Japanese region of Ashio. Copper proved a bad neighbour in both locations, having deleterious effects on cattle ranching in the Rockies and silk worm cultivation around Ashio. The American West and Japan could not have offered a sharper cultural contrast but they shared a common environmental fate.

Manuel Llorca contributed a paper – his second – on the merchants who joined together different mining districts and the international market. He took as his example Huth & Co., the London merchant banking house that was active in trading copper ore from both Chile and Australia. Huth’s success was attributable, Llorca argued, to its diverse interests – the firm was genuinely global in its operations – and the skill with which ore trading was aligned with other activities. An alternative strategy for marketing ore was highlighted by Inés Roldán de Montaud (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain) who spoke on ‘A forgotten producer: copper mining in eastern Cuba during the nineteenth century’. Cuban mines, she pointed out, were the most important source of imported ore for Welsh smelters in the 1830s and early 1840s. Cuban ores were not widely traded, however. The mining companies were based upon British capital and were aligned with specific smelting companies in the Swansea district. The mines of El Cobre also made extensive use of British technological expertise – a sharp contrast with Chile, where the traditional mining sector was sustained by local resources and local technologies. Technological practices were addressed by the final contribution to the workshop, that of Denis Morin (Université de Toulouse le Mirail), who spoke on ‘XIX^th century French mining engineers’ reports and drawings on Swansea industry: industrial espionage or technological exchanges?’ Drawing upon unpublished reports by students at the elite École des Mines in Paris, Morin discussed whether a free circulation of technical knowledge existed within nineteenth-century European industry and asked whether a distinct knowledge regime was necessary for industrial take-off.