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The first book-length history of gems in early modern science offers a thought-provoking new take on the Scientific Revolution.
 
In Gems and the New Science, Michael Bycroft argues that gems were connected to major developments in the “new science” between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. As he explains, precious and semiprecious stones were at the center of dramatic shifts in natural knowledge in early modern Europe. They were used to investigate luminescence, electricity, combustion, chemical composition, and more. They were collected by naturalists; measured by mathematicians; and rubbed, burned, and dissolved by experimental philosophers. This led to the demise of the traditional way of classifying gems—which grouped them by transparency, color, and locality—and the turn to density, refraction, chemistry, and crystallography as more reliable guides for sorting these substances.
 
The science of gems shows that material evaluation was as important as material production in the history of science. It also shows the value of seeing science as the product of the interaction between different material worlds. The book begins by bringing these insights to bear on five themes of the Scientific Revolution. Each of the subsequent chapters deals with a major episode in early modern science, from the expansion of natural history in the sixteenth century to the emergence of applied science early in the nineteenth century. This important work is not only the first book-length history of the science of gems but also a fresh interpretation of the Scientific Revolution and an argument for using a new form of materialism to understand the evolution of science.

In an uncertain international economic environment, the United States is increasingly dependent upon foreign suppliers for many things, including nonfuel minerals. This book deals with the major problems and policy issues involved with these minerals. The major problems concern the medium- and long-term availability of world supplies, the competitive structure of nonfuel mineral industries, and the location of world production and consumption. Special attention is given to the production of nonfuel minerals in developing countries and the role of foreign investment in Third World mineral industries. The major policy include reducing U.S. vulnerability to disruption of imports of nonfuel minerals; subsidizing, or protecting against imports, domestic producers of nonfuel minerals; conflicts between environmentalists and the mining industry; and international loans to Third World metal-producing countries. While the treatment of conflicting policy positions is objective, the author comes out on the side of unrestricted competition in world markets, including elimination of domestic subsidies to import barriers, the use of economic stockpiles to reduce vulnerability to import disruption, and maintenance of strict environmental pollution standards. The author is optimistic about the long-run outlook for mineral supplies necessary to meet world requirements for economic growth. United States domestic mineral independence may be unnecessary in terms of national security and too costly to consumers and the environment.

Red Metal is a different kind of book on American industrial history. It’s a dramatic story linked to the present by the energies and fortunes of the men who move in colorful realism through its pages; it’s a story of fortunes and misfortunes, of foresight and mistakes, of successes and failures of American enterprise relating to the largest of the copper mines of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The story traces the development of one of the oldest and richest copper companies in America. From the pathless wilds in which the great Calumet conglomerate ore body was first discovered came the achievement of many years of world leadership in the copper industry and the present aspects of a company with manufacturing plants that fabricate products of copper, copper-base alloys, aluminum, and steel.

In Residual Governance, Gabrielle Hecht dives into the wastes of gold and uranium mining in South Africa to explore how communities, experts, and artists fight for infrastructural and environmental justice. Hecht outlines how mining in South Africa is a prime example of what she theorizes as residual governance—the governance of waste and discard, governance that is purposefully inefficient, and governance that treats people and places as waste and wastelands. She centers the voices of people who resist residual governance and the harms of toxic mining waste to highlight how mining’s centrality to South African history reveals the links between race, capitalism, the state, and the environment. In this way, Hecht shows how the history of mining in South Africa and the resistance to residual governance and environmental degradation is a planetary story: the underlying logic of residual governance lies at the heart of contemporary global racial capitalism and is a major accelerant of the Anthropocene.