Books

Born with a Copper Spoon

Our world depends on copper and Born with a Copper Spoon shows how we get it, and how the metal had been mined, distributed and controlled over the last two centuries.

This is a global story and the book’s fourteen chapters cover North America, Latin America, Europe, Central Africa, the Middle East, East Asia and Oceania.

Paperback is now available via University of British Columbia Press and the book’s introduction is free to read.

Reviews: The Africa Report, International Affairs, Mining History Association, Environmental History, Historisk tidsskrift, Journal of Australasian Mining History, Technology and Culture.

White Mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt

White Mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt looks at the globalised nature of work on Zambia’s copper mines. It follows the fortunes of the white mineworkers who migrated to the region and who became some of the most affluent workers on the planet.

This group was a highly mobile global workforce which became a racialised working class moving between industrial centres across the world.

The book’s introduction is free to read and there’s also an Open Access version of the book available here.

You can learn more about the book in an interview I gave about it or by watching the discussion at the book launch.

Reviews: Journal of Contemporary History, South African Historical Journal, Connections, Canadian Journal of African Studies

Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa

Rethinking White Societies challenges the assumption that white society in Southern Africa was uniformly wealthy or culturally homogenous. Ten chapters by look at white workers and the white poor in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The book is open access so all the chapters can be read online and downloaded for free.

Africa is a Country hosted a series on the book including an overview of the book by Danelle and myself and short essays based on some of the chapters. Danelle and myself also did an interview about the book.

Reviews: African Studies Review, Société suisse d’études africaines Newsletter, Journal of Southern African Studies

Eloquently written, the author brings a colourful cast of characters to life… his book is not just about Zambia, or mining per se, but has a much broader applicability: it covers mineral wealth and international capital, migration and labour, trade unions and economic development, and race in southern and central Africa. White Mineworkers On Zambia’s Copperbelt is an incredibly rich book that deserves to be widely read.

— Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists

Throughout, readers are consistently reminded of the potential for sweeping technological revolutions to recast previous certainties at the human level… As the green transition potentially increases demand for a host of commodities, with the potential to reshape the geopolitical map once more, readers would do well to consult this edited volume for insights on how large-scale global evolutions have played out in the past.

— International Affairs