Producing mining territories: The centrality of artisanal and small-scale gold mining in Colombia from colonization to the present

Abstract

Focussing on gold mining in Colombia, this article explores the relationship between long-term efforts to promote industrialized large-scale gold mining characterized by deep verticality, and the persistence of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), concentrated on minerals at or close to the surface. Since the 18th century, governments and elites have by turns supported and displaced ASM in efforts to either harness or restrict it in the pursuit of implanting more industrial, technical and capital intensive forms of mining. On the one hand, such mining – in contrast to ASM, is spatially both more “vertical” and more fixed in place, and thus more amenable to state control and capital concentration and accumulation. On the other, large-scale mining (LSM) has proven vulnerable to the vagaries of capital and, repeatedly unable to subsume ASM labor to its will, has pursued ASM's repression and flexibilization. Through a historical exploration of these issues, this article emphasizes the long-term resilience of ASM, an activity widely considered marginal, as well as its essential role – not as the opposite of LSM –, but as the sine qua non of the apparent modernity it is often accused of undermining. This article thus expands discussions on verticality in the context of extraction, drawing attention to the importance of mining’s multiple and interwoven territorial expressions.