Seeking a Global History of Gold

BENJAMIN MOUNTFORD AND STEPHEN TUFFNELL

NOTHING SET THE WORLD IN MOTION like gold. Between 1848 and the turn of the twentieth century, the global rush to find and extract the precious metal from the earth in previously unimaginable quantities inspired a dramatic burst of movement and energy, affecting the course of world history. In California, and then across the Pacific Rim and parts of Africa, gold discoveries and the rushes that followed birthed new territories and states; triggered short-term booms and busts; provoked violent conflict with local indigenous and other resident communities; sparked entrepreneurship of all kinds; reordered production, trade, and labor; exposed humankind's capacity to alter the natural world; and created new hierarchies of difference and disconnection. These transformations took place on a global stage, as capital, people, and raw materials connected distant areas of the world in a spontaneous, contagious search for gold.

Contemporaries agonized over the frenetic energy, social dislocation, and runaway growth triggered by gold rushes. In doing so, they reached for the strongest natural metaphor they knew: the powerful, unsettling threats of diseases, fevers, and epidemics. From California, one correspondent was "suddenly attacked with violent, extraordinary symptoms," explaining that it was "a temporary fit of delirium brought on by a new epidemic — the yellow or gold fever." As Sydney's working men began leaving for California, one resident complained in June 1849 that the townspeople had been "completely bit by the yellow fever." Gold fever was said to infect naive greenhorns; rage across prairies, oceans, and continents; and ravage town and city alike through depopulation. "Fever" captured the connected nature of the phenomenon many people found themselves in but also the widespread anxiety produced by gold rushes and the sense that irrationality propelled them. Like illness, gold mining was a gamble: luck rather than the diligence or virtue of the individual determined the outcome. But this was part of the allure and kept many miners at work. "A man never knows when he is going to pick up the rarest nugget in the world," wrote one Klondiker. "I may find it tomorrow, and I probably will not find more than a few cents. And I am likely to find our shaft full of water." Gold seemed to offer equal measures of promise and peril. "The touch of unlimited gold dissolves society into its elements, produces a total disorganization, the effects of which defy conjecture," reflected Melbourne's Argus in 1849.

It was little wonder that gold rushes left contemporaries delirious: the second half of the nineteenth century was convulsed by repeated, overlapping gold rushes. California in 1848 and Victoria in 1851 were just the beginning. Between them, the western American states of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana experienced forty gold rushes. Nevada and California, meanwhile, remained in a state of near-constant gold discovery. In Australia, between 1851 and 1894, there were twenty-eight rushes. In the decade beginning in 1857, five of the New Zealand provinces — Nelson, Otago, Marlborough, Canterbury, and Auckland — experienced gold rushes. In 1868, gold was discovered on the bed of the Ivalojoki River in Lapland, triggering a rush to the region that only peaked in 1872. After the Witwatersrand gold rush began in 1886, geologists scoured Southern Rhodesia (where a rush began in the fall of 1890) and the Gold Coast (where there was a period of gold rushes between 1877 and 1900) for the next bonanza. The Klondike gold rush (1896–99) in Yukon Territory was just the latest of a series of gold rushes in present-day Canada, following the rush to Fraser River, British Columbia, in 1858.

As the earth yielded its riches, gold production raced upward. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the annual world output of gold ranged between 10 and 20 tons. After the strikes in California and Victoria, this figure had leapt to 180 tons, and by the turn of the twentieth century it had reached 450 tons per year. Put another way, in the fifty years between California and the Klondike, more gold was mined from the earth than in the previous three millennia. In 1902, after visiting gold mines in the Transvaal, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), India, the Malay Peninsula, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, Canada, the United States, and Mexico (and acknowledging his desire to one day visit gold mines in Russia, China, Japan, Korea, the Dutch East Indies, Hungary, and South and Central America), the Economist's respected mining correspondent James Herbert Curle calculated that gold mining added roughly £70 million annually to the world economy.

An enormous and eclectic band of writers have added almost as many pages. Gold rushes were as much cultural watersheds as they were economic. At the mines, in the rare pauses between the swish of the pan, the crunch of the shovel, and the crash of the battery, one might have heard the furious scratching of pens and pencils on paper. Contemporary diarists, journalists, boosters, and administrators (as well as many others) recorded the awe, excitement, dread, and frustration of the dogged quest for gold. An incredible total of 285 emigrant's guides, cheap literary melodramas, and pamphlets about gold rush California and travel to the goldfields had appeared in print by 1860. Less than a decade after the beginning of the rush to Victoria in southeastern Australia, books on that gold-rich British colony had been published in German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, and Italian, alongside the numerous English-language volumes being printed in London. From midcentury,...