Abstract
In many ways, the vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. One on a high plateau stretched out across the border between what is now Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia with a sub-tropical climate; the other on the rolling foothills of Changbai Mountains in what is now Liaoning Province, northeastern China, with a humid continental climate. Yet anyone who visited either of these places would immediately and unavoidably have become aware of a basic fact about both: that racial hierarchies governed life and work on the mines. This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, although it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken. Second, through this comparison to argue that the prevalence and significance of race as a way of organizing life and work in the mining industry has been underestimated. We support this claim with an overview of production and everyday life in two seemingly very different mining regions: the Fushun coalfields and the Central African Copperbelt (see figure 1).
Highlights
The vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places
This article is about that basic fact, and in it we aim to make a two-fold contribution: First, it is a comparative history of mining regions, which, it might seem an area of study ripe for comparison, is seldom undertaken
In 1936, white mineworkers on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt formed a racially-exclusive trade union, and subsequently embarked on repeated wildcat strike action during the Second World War to win major wage increases, a closed shop for the union, and a color bar preventing African mineworkers from undertaking skilled work. This action was closely informed by the replacement of white mineworkers with African mineworkers at Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK)’s operations, which had itself been partly motivated by white industrial unrest
Summary
The vast industrial complexes that developed on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields in the early twentieth century were very different places. In his most recent effort to provide a framework for comparative mining history, Berger identified eleven themes in mining history—the equivalent of Taylor’s concepts—that he contends transnational or comparative perspectives would “underline the fruitfulness of looking beyond one specific locality, region, or nation.”[10] Our comparative study of race and imperialism is our humble contribution to Berger’s list of themes In this comparison, we draw inspiration from those scholars who have written on how racial thinking informed and structured the organization of labor processes and relations, and how racial divisions shaped or “fractured”, to paraphrase British sociologists Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea, class formation, something that American and South African historians have been alert to.[11] According to David Roediger and Elizabeth Esch, capital depends on produced differences among labor for its profits and in the era where scientific racism and industrial production existed, racial knowledge enabled management to justify differential treatment of a highly diverse multinational working population and to rank these workers based on these differences. The mining site was as much a site for producing racial differences as it was a site for producing material wealth
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