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The Commonwealth of Empire explores the overlooked history of the Bawdwin mining complex in Burma's Northern Shan States, focusing on its development during the British colonial period. Drawing on global and imperial history, author David Baillargeon showcases how industrial-scale mining transformed Bawdwin into a hub of commerce and migration, especially under the Burma Corporation in the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, Bawdwin had become one of the largest industrial sites in the world, staffed by a multinational workforce from South, Southeast, and East Asia, and managed by foreign engineers from the United States and Australia. Known as the “Commonwealth of Namtu” for its diverse workforce, the site exemplifies how colonial and corporate interests overlapped, and how such commercial spaces were shaped, contested, and reimagined locally. In telling the stories of the diverse agents and workers who developed the site and made it their home, The Commonwealth of Empire uncovers how and why a space like Bawdwin has been forgotten over time, interrogating its marginalization in national and regional histories and linking such forgetting to the nature of Britain's colonial project.

Baillargeon argues that recovering such forgotten histories requires moving beyond nation-based frameworks and embracing methods that illuminate the global forces behind colonial enterprises. In doing so, the book offers opportunities to decolonize histories and spaces of occupation that fit uneasily into existing frameworks of empire and nation.

The first adventurers into the New World faced a fundamental legal challenge: how to secure rights to any mineral claims they discovered. Early conquistadors worked under charters that required them to return a portion of their findings to the Spanish crown, but those without such charters had no formal protection—and the crown was slow to clarify individual rights. This uncertainty only grew as miners pushed into the lands that would become the Western United States.

When gold was discovered in California, miners suddenly found themselves operating without any governing laws during the period between the end of the war with Mexico and the establishment of formal U.S. jurisdiction. In response, and without official sanction, they formed self-governing “mining districts,” best understood as mutual protection societies. These districts marked the first organized attempt to define boundaries and create rules for establishing and maintaining mining claims. As the early rushes in California and Nevada subsided, miners carried these practices with them into Arizona and other western territories.

In Arizona, no comprehensive collection of these early regulations has ever existed. The Law of the Mineraddresses this gap by tracing the development of mineral law in early Arizona and presenting the full text of every mining district regulation that could be found. This work serves both the mining industry and historians seeking to identify the individuals involved in creating the districts and to understand these districts’ historical boundaries.

The Price of Copper is a veteran journalist’s unflinching investigation of a family tragedy and long-standing mystery—the sensational 1938 suicide of powerful New Mexico copper mine boss Rone B. Tempest Sr. on the eve of his scheduled testimony before a federal labor board. From this dramatic opening, the book paints a vivid portrait of open-pit copper mining, labor conflicts, and corporate-sponsored racism in company mining towns across the Mountain West from the early years of the twentieth century to the first successes of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

The author’s paternal grandfather, Rone Tempest Sr., was the general manager of the Chino Copper Mine in Santa Rita, New Mexico, which was owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation and under investigation over labor practices. His boss was Salt Lake City copper baron and ruthless anti-union strikebreaker Daniel C. Jackling—the “Prophet of Porphyry,” who pioneered the industrial mining of low-grade copper ores by introducing the use of dynamite, steam shovels, rail, and giant mill works. After detailing the saga around Tempest Sr.’s death, the story follows the trajectory of the Chino mine over time, including the rise of predominantly Hispanic labor unions and the advancement of Hispanic workers to senior management roles—gains in civil rights that would have made the labor environment entirely unrecognizable to those fighting for reform in 1938. 

A compelling and dramatic history of the great early twentieth-century advances in western copper mining that provided the essential metal needed to electrify the continent and the world, The Price of Copper is a unique personal story that connects to the broader history of copper mining in the West, as well as a valuable social history offering a new narrative about the dynamics of corporate management and giving additional insight into the formation of the “Copper Age” in the United States.

Mining in North America has long been criticized for its impact on the natural environment. Mica Jorgenson’s The Weight of Gold explores the history of Ontario, Canada’s rise to prominence in the gold mining industry, while detailing a series of environmental crises related to extraction activities. In Ontario in 1909, the discovery of exceptionally rich hard rock gold deposits in the Abitibi region in the north precipitated industrial development modeled on precedents in Australia, South Africa, and the United States. By the late 1920s, Ontario’s mines had reached their maturity, and in 1928, Minister of Mines Charles McRae called Canada “the mineral treasure house to [the] world.”

Mining companies increasingly depended upon their ability to redistribute the burdens of mining onto surrounding communities—a strategy they continue to use today—both at home and abroad. Jorgenson connects Canadian gold mining to its international context, revealing that Ontario’s gold mines informed extractive knowledge which would go on to shape Canada’s mining industry over the next century.