Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.

About the Author

Benjamin Mountford, Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, is the author of Britain, China, and Colonial Australia and coeditor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2017-18).

Stephen Tuffnell, Associate Professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford, is currently completing Emigrant Foreign Relations: Independence and Interdependence in the Atlantic, c. 1789–1902. He researches US history from a global perspective.

List of Illustrations

Preface
John Darwin and Jay Sexton
Editors’ Acknowledgments
Timeline and Map: Selected Nineteenth-Century
Gold Rushes

part one
global transformations in
the age of gold

1 • Seeking a Global History of Gold
Benjamin Mountford and Stephen Tuff nell
2 • California, Coincidence, and Empire
Elliott West

part two
settler societies and gold
rush democracy
3 • Gold and the Public in the Nineteenth-Century
Gold Rushes
David Goodman
4 • The Pacific Gold Rushes and the Struggle
for Order
Benjamin Mountford
5 • The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and
Global Politics, 1849–1910
Mae M. Ngai

part three
finance, speculation, and
the economics of gold rushes
6 • Frenzied Finance: Gold Mining in the Globalizing
South, circa 1886–1896
Ian Phimister
7 • Dreams of a “Johannesburg of West Africa”: The Gold
Coast’s Moment in the Imperial Rush for Gold
Cassandra Mark-Thiesen
8 • Creating a Global Industry? Geology, Capital, and
Company Formation on the Goldfields of the Industrial Age
Erik Eklund

part four
expertise, the environment,
and mining technologies
9 • The Real Wealth of the World: Hydraulic Mining
and the Environment in the Circum-Pacific Goldfields
Andrew C. Isenberg
10 • Engineering Gold Rushes: Engineers and the Mechanics
of Global Connectivity
Stephen Tuffnell
11 • Grounding Capitalism: Geology, Labor, and the Nome
Gold Rush
Bathsheba Demuth

Select Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Reviews

"This collection moves the study of migration, finance, and technology forward in consistently strong essays that are as readable as they are informative."
— H-Net

"This book is a welcome contribution, opening agendas for future research in many dimensions of mining history, and reminding exponents of any one national mining history against undue exceptionalism."
— Australian Historical Studies

"This excellent book provides a needed international perspective on gold rush histories. . . . The international perspective, and the explanation of the linkages among the gold rushes, make this book valuable for researchers of any of the individual gold rushes, of the political and financial histories of the countries involved, and of colonial history."
— Journal of American History

"The essays provide in-depth coverage of topics not typically discussed and help readers better understand the continuities and differences that distinguished the far-flung gold rushes of this period."
— California History

"At long last we have the gold rush phenomenon presented in a truly global and comparative fashion—from California to Alaska, and from eastern Australia to Ghana. This collection of essays by esteemed scholars changes the way we think about any particular gold rush as well as the complex social, economic, and political manifestations they brought about." —David Igler, author of The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush

"An outstanding collection of essays exemplifying global history at its best—dynamic, interconnected, and original. Gold rush societies brought people together from all over the globe; everyone came from somewhere else. In California and the Australian colonies, Chinese migrants sometimes comprised up to a quarter of all fortune seekers. Cosmopolitan in composition, these jostling, rapacious, New World communities were also crucibles of nationalist exclusion. This superb book charts the material, political, and social changes effected by these momentous events." —Marilyn Lake, author of Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform

“Richly detailed and conceptually adventurous, this book shows how the rush for gold catapulted the nineteenth century into rapid globalization. Everything was affected—labor, capital, demography, environment, politics—as this collaboration of leading historians reveal. Global history at its best.” —Alison Bashford, author of Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews