Uneven Development, Mining, and Money in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Emma Teitelman, McGill University

During and after the U.S. Civil War, conflicts over the structures of money and banking intersected with conflicts over the organization of property rights in sub-surface minerals. In struggles over monetary policy, hard-money advocates pushed rapid mineral extraction as a response to demands for soft-money policies, lending political backing to a mining policy agenda. These links between monetary and mining policy are, perhaps, intuitive, but they were not automatic. They formed due to the political efforts of western mining interests, who forged links to eastern financiers as they pushed Congress to formally privatize mineral lands, including subsurface resources. While monetary policy gradually receded from their politics, those links continued to evolve, particularly in relation to eastern investments in mining schools and training programs for engineers. Eastern financiers benefitted from these new arrangements, which made property more financially secure and easier to consolidate, and produced a professionalized class of skilled workers who were capable of realizing greater rates of profit. Ultimately this paper identifies the social forces and political coalitions that produced mining’s legal, administrative, and educational institutions, which diverged from both past practices and from patterns in many other resource-rich countries.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 197. Rethinking the Developmental State 4: North America