Ownership of the earth forever and ever: engineering nature, race, and labor in Southern Africa and North America, 1860-1924

Jones, Douglas R.

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115916 Copy

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.

Graduation Semester

2022-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2022 Douglas Jones

Owning Collections