Global History of Gold Rushes

Benjamin Mountford, Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, is the author of Britain, China, and Colonial Australia and coeditor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2017-18).   Stephen Tuffnell, Associate Professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford, is currently completing Emigrant Foreign Relations: Independence and Interdependence in the Atlantic, c. 1789–1902. He researches US history from a global perspective.

"This collection moves the study of migration, finance, and technology forward in consistently strong essays that are as readable as they are informative."

• List of IllustrationsPrefaceJohn Darwin and Jay SextonEditors’ AcknowledgmentsTimeline and Map: Selected Nineteenth-CenturyGold Rushespart oneglobal transformations inthe age of gold1 • Seeking a Global History of GoldBenjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuff nell2 • California, Coincidence, and EmpireElliott Westpart twosettler societies and goldrush democracy3 • Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-CenturyGold RushesDavid Goodman4 • The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Strugglefor OrderBenjamin Mountford5 • The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes andGlobal Politics, 1849–1910Mae M. Ngaipart threefinance, speculation, andthe economics of gold rushes6 • Frenzied Finance: Gold Mining in the GlobalizingSouth, circa 1886–1896Ian Phimister7 • Dreams of a “Johannesburg of West Africa”: The GoldCoast’s Moment in the Imperial Rush for GoldCassandra Mark-Thiesen8 • Creating a Global Industry? Geology, Capital, andCompany Formation on the Goldfields of the Industrial AgeErik Eklundpart fourexpertise, the environment,and mining technologies9 • The Real Wealth of the World: Hydraulic Miningand the Environment in the Circum-Pacific GoldfieldsAndrew C. Isenberg10 • Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanicsof Global ConnectivityStephen Tuffnell11 • Grounding Capitalism: Geology, Labor, and the NomeGold RushBathsheba DemuthSelect BibliographyList of ContributorsIndex