Since the mid-2000s, Zambia’s ‘new Copperbelt’ – the new mines of copper, cobalt and other metals in the country’s North-Western Province – has attracted the attention of extractive investors and social scientists alike. While researchers (including Negi, Kapesa and Chansa) have provided insights into this frontier mining region, North-Western Province has not previously received the sustained ethnographic attention given to the ‘old’ Copperbelt that consistently generated insights into mining-based urbanization, from the Rhodes Livingstone Institute to the works of Burawoy, Ferguson, Lee and Mususa. Rita Kesselring’s second book fills that gap, and will serve as the standard work on the region’s mining industry for years to come.

The book’s Introduction provides an exemplary analysis of how to understand and research extractive industries, utilizing a critical analysis of existing works on dependency and (under-)development that rightly emphasizes the unequal but mutually constitutive relationship between global South production areas and global North financial investment – the latter constituted here by trading companies such as Glencore and Trafigura, which are based in Switzerland. Kesselring’s focus (she is an Associate Professor at the University of St Gallen) reveals the links between Switzerland’s supposedly orderly financial centres and the ‘chaotic’ growth of the mine town of Solwezi – a chaos that, she shows, follows identifiable contours of inclusion and exclusion, along class, racial and ethnic lines. The book demonstrates, not merely asserts, that the wealth of countries such as Switzerland depends on countries like Zambia.

The inherent downside of this focus is that the wider cluster of non-traditional investment that has flowed into the new mines of the North-West Province over the past two decades is less well captured. One unavoidable disadvantage of the study, for which ethnographic research was conducted between 2015 and 2018, is that such apparently entrenched global–local patterns mask the profound instability of these relationships. Kesselring’s Introduction refers to the region’s envisaged future – alongside that of the bordering Democratic Republic of the Congo – as a hub of US-dominated critical minerals production, exported via the (yet to be) rehabilitated Lobito railway. Such potentialities – of diversified dependency and intensified exploitation by new investors – are not substantively addressed in the book itself.

Notwithstanding the book’s global analytical reach, each chapter is framed by specific places, timescales and foci. Chapter 1 provides brief historical context, before introducing readers to the political geology of the ‘boom town’ of Solwezi and Kansanshi mine. Kesselring navigates authoritatively between global mineral markets, national politics, local economic and governmental frameworks, and personal experiences. Importantly, she establishes that only 3 per cent of Solwezi’s rapidly expanding population are themselves mineworkers and that ‘[t]he largest part of Solwezi’s population does not have a direct connection to the mine’ (p. 28). North-west mining towns such as Solwezi are growing in a distinctly neoliberal way, in contrast to the twentieth-century company towns of the Copperbelt (where today privatization has created conditions comparable to those in Solwezi). Bemba-speaking migrants from the old Copperbelt rub shoulders in Solwezi with new arrivals from elsewhere in Zambia and from across the nearby Congolese border, as well as with Chinese and Western managers, supervisors and entrepreneurs. Inequalities of wealth, ethnicity, gender, skill and connectedness divide this burgeoning urban society geographically and socially.

Chapter 2 focuses on Solwezi’s local government, shedding helpful light on a neglected topic in the study of both Zambia and mining towns more generally. While Solwezi council struggles to manage the effects of rapid growth wrought by mining, Kesselring documents its attempts to raise revenue and provide infrastructure, as well as local electoral politics. The scale of analysis shifts to the household in Chapter 3, with an insightful explanation of how new migrants secure land and build homes. What appears to be anarchic urban growth is, Kesselring demonstrates, the cumulative result of thousands of residents’ labour, investment and imagination of their urbanity, in which adaptability is key to success. The formal economy, in the shape of the capital-intensive mining operation, is dependent on and symbiotic with informal neighbourhoods that provide labour and other local inputs.

Chapter 4 analyses, in contrast, the hyper-planned space of the gated Kansanshi Golf Estate, reserved for the mine’s overwhelmingly white, mainly South African, managerial employees. As well as demonstrating the extraverted nature of this expatriate enclave, Kesselring usefully compares it to similar enclaves elsewhere. Chapters 5 – helpfully contrasting the electrification challenges of mine companies and Solwezi’s residents – and 6 – focusing on the trading networks that extract mineral wealth from Zambia to Swiss ‘letterbox’ addresses – provide finely grained analyses of under-documented practices that are central to global economics.

Taken as a whole, Kesselring’s work helpfully renders ‘globalization’ – an ephemeral term that typically presents the workings of global capitalism as weightless, invisible, unbordered and consequently unmanageable – as instead legible, measurable, geographically specific and (with appropriate political will) governable.