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.
