Engineering Gold Rushes

This chapter, “Engineering Gold Rushes,” by Stephen Tuffnell, examines the mechanics of late nineteenth-century global connectivity through the development of “mine engineering” as a global profession and the manifold interactions between the global and the national that contributed to that process. Internationally mobile mine engineers developed the mechanisms for transporting and maintaining the technologies of empire and extraction that converged on the goldfields. Nongovernmental mining institutes founded across the world, international congresses, and widely circulating technical journals acted as mechanisms for knowledge exchange and forums for cooperation. Underlying the emergence of specialist engineers were higher education systems that aimed at developing rival national or imperial professional identities that existed in tension with their global roles. Mine engineers were therefore key protagonists in the shifts discussed in this volume: from individual placer mining to highly capitalized corporate mining, from simple technologies to complex chemical extraction, and from free enterprise to wage labor.