Ownership of the earth forever and ever: engineering nature, race, and labor in Southern Africa and North America, 1860-1924
Jones, Douglas R.
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115916
Description
Title
Ownership of the earth forever and ever: engineering nature, race, and labor in Southern Africa and North America, 1860-1924
Author(s)
Jones, Douglas R.
Issue Date
2022-07-12
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Barnes, Teresa
Burton, Antoinette
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Barnes, Teresa
Burton, Antoinette
Committee Member(s)
Hoganson, Kristin
Lichtenstein, Alex
Roediger, David
Department of Study
History
Discipline
History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
history
global history
south african history
us history
history of engineering
mining
whiteness
masculinity
racial capitalism
environmental history
Abstract
This dissertation considers the networks, methods, and practices of a group of mining engineers active in Canada, the United States, and South Africa in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth century mining engineers to map new geographies of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and territories of extraction. By tracing the careers of these mining engineers, most from the United States, I show that as embodiments of “white extractivism,” mining engineers were instrumental to establishing and furthering imperial regimes.
Using archival material from Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as many engineering periodicals, I argue that although engineers’ prescriptions were cloaked in scientific reason, in fact engineers were fortified by faith in whiteness and hypermasculinity as a means to master both the earth and workers. Mining engineers viewed the earth and the people living upon it were nothing more than problems suited to mechanical and “objective” solutions. In practice, as I show, mining engineers set in motion a process of slow violence and differential exposure to death on a vast scale. Nevertheless, these attempts at mastery were subject to challenge, disruption, and unintended consequences at every turn.
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