Subterranean Frontier

This chapter investigates the connections between culture, technology, and environmental change during the tin mining boom in colonial Southeast Asia, the world’s dominant producer region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It approaches the growth of the industry as a particular form of commodity frontier, whose topography comprised not just the surface landscapes over which it expanded but also the various grades and depths of ore beneath them. Like most commodity frontiers, it presented a series of resource windfalls tapped by successive waves of entrepreneurs producing for an international market. But beneath these commonalities were two important differences: the central role of new technologies in repeatedly pushing the frontier into new deposits; and the ways in which the tin industry was shaped by ideas about nature, race, waste, and efficiency that were deeply embedded in the project of European imperialism.

Archaeology · Frontier · Geography · Eurasian Exchange Networks