mininghistory.bsky.social
Historian and consultant. I work on mining, labour, migration and Southern Africa.
More on https://duncan.money
Contact: [email protected]
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When I studied history 20 years ago, people would often either politely mention a museum they had been to, or tell me openly it was a pointless subject.
Now when I tell people I'm a historian, people usually react with genuine interest, and this is true in several different countries.
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Very unexpected
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Surely the breathless reporting will be Wagner forces have taken over AFRICOM.
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In March 2021 commodity traders Mercuria Energy Trading were defrauded in a deal to buy 10,000 tons of low-grade copper: they’d been sold rocks painted to look like copper. A Turkish firm were blamed, but Ea-Nasir fans knew the truth:
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They will also put a PDF version of your article online, the same service that Elsevier provides.
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Why not just publish your research in something like the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and South Asian Studies. At least it will be cheaper.
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It might have been exactly the same tale if the MDC had come to power as the MMD did in Zambia.
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This is not to say life was rosy under the one-party state. The chosen theme of the Labour Day celebrations in 1984 was "Economic Survival"
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The labour movement tried to formulate alternative policies to structural adjustment and demanded that the IMF consult with them.
Ultimately they were crushed by the severe economic recession that decimated the movement's ranks.
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Malaysia? To further complicate things, the tea could be from Uganda, as tea from there is often marketed as Kenyan tea due to the latter having some international recognition.
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Hadn't thought of that! Usually all I find are references in secondary literature to decreasing international travel times over the 19th century, without specifics of destinations, how many days, etc.
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Need an equivalent to this phenomenal resource calculating travel time in the Roman Empire for recent centuries:
orbis.stanford.edu
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Wow. "Thank you for your email. Please do not come close to me"
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Not been tempted yet. Maybe I have missed out on lucrative opportunities.
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The US import statistics are not in the article but you can look them up on USITC DataWeb (as that part of the US government is still currently functioning):
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Ha! As you may know, there was a company called Ancient Ruins Mining in early c20th Zimbabwe that assumed these stone structures did have gold and old mines in them, and destroyed several of them in the search for gold.
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This one with a novel twist about mining, which fails to account for the fact that there isn't a gold or silver mine under Great Zimbabwe.
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Bizarre that the century-old theory that the Phonecians/Arabs/etc. built Great Zimbabwe is still in circulation.
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There is a fading 2007 article from the Sunday Nation about the lions on display in the railway museum in Nairobi. It mentions the museum was then trying to get the lions returned but had not made a formal request.
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I picked it up at random when I was visiting a library to get something else. One of the best impulse decisions I've made. Enjoyed it so much I went and bought my own copy to re-read it.
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For one thing, Catton treats Chinese miners on the goldfields as people whose actions and motivations are integral to the book's plot, rather than background figures whose presence as miners is simply acknowledged.
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The best recent-ish example I know is Eleanor Catton's The Illuminaries. Set during the 1860s New Zealand gold rush, it is remarkably historically accurate.
Perhaps because when she studied creative writing, one of her lecturers was a prolific mining historian of New Zealand!
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My personal favourite is the egg cube served on the Gulf airlines, an item of food removed as far as possible both in form and taste from an actual egg.
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From the publication's self-description:
"Our mission is to be all about what matters to men"