Mining Memories: The Nitrate and Copper Trades

For nations seeking economic growth and pro gress, was nature destiny?In the early twentieth century, engineering advances in irrigation, transport, energy, and industry, along with advances in global trade, inspired ambitions to defy nature-imposed limits to growth-in part by helping to redistribute minerals and thereby reduce conflict between wealthy "have" and "have not" nations.The United States, having settled all the territory to the Pacific, now claimed dominion over an arsenal of minerals, fields, and forests.The "have" nations of Europe held vast colonial possessions in Africa and Asia.The "have nots," Germany and Italy, had far smaller colonies.A handful of postcolonial states, Chile among them, built great wealth as suppliers of raw materials.The First World War changed the distribution of power and the mineral calculus: At the postwar League of Nations, US minerals adviser Charles Leith argued for a coordinated minerals market that could break nations' habit "of allowing ourselves to be overrun by environmental conditions to which we remain passive and more or less oblivious." 1 Leith's advice was informed in part by his observations of Chile's natu ral nitrate trade, called salitre in Spanish, which was then a major global commodity.Nitrate made fortunes across Europe and Chile, but by 1930, the industry had gone bust.Ever since, nitrates have served as the textbook case of failed mineral-based development.2 Textbook histories of nitrates as failed development often begin by lauding nature's bounty and the pioneers who discovered it.They note the contradictions of an ele ment that si mul ta neously gave life as a fertilizer and took it away when used as an explosive.They measure the industry's success by the number of oficinas-the unexpected name given to nitrate mines-built across the desert.They note Chile's control of the Atacama Desert, the world's 2 Mining Memories: The Nitrate and Copper Trades