Almost no global histories of the aluminum industry exist, apart from business histories of a single transnational company, such as Alcoa, or national histories that describe the multinational aluminum interests within a given country, such as Jamaica or Guinea. This edited volume on the political economy of the global bauxite industry is therefore a much-needed and welcome addition to the literature. Successfully spanning multiple countries and world regions, it includes chapters dedicated to Jamaica, Greece, the Gold Coast/Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, India, and Norway, as well as analysis of companies involved in the British Empire (from Africa to Australia), Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union.
The introduction by the editors and the opening chapter by Espen Storli offer useful global overviews of the industry as a whole across the twentieth century. The main focus falls between about the 1920s and the 1980s, although a few chapters extend earlier and later. The book also covers a wide range of companies involved in bauxite mining and aluminum smelting, including not only Alcoa, Alcan, Reynolds, and Kaiser (the usual suspects in the U.S. American literature), but also a cast of characters including Aluminium of Greece, the British Aluminium Company, Pechiney, German VAW, Rusal, and Norsk Hydro, among others. Undoubtedly, then—despite lacking dedicated chapters on China, Brazil, or the recent rise of smelters in the Middle East—this is one of the most comprehensive histories of the global bauxite and aluminum industry.
Beyond mere expansion of global coverage, however, the book offers several fascinating themes that draw the chapters into conversation with one another, though by no means univocal agreement. Running throughout is the question of the relation between state interests (including strategic military needs for aluminum driving a “military-industrial complex”) and private corporate interests (including the often-assumed necessity of vertical integration with the aluminum sector). What the varied case studies demonstrate is that neither phenomenon is always the case, but the reasons are complicated and by no means obvious. The detailed studies therefore help to delineate the specific “politics of mining” and its “modes of governance,” as Bonnie Campbell describes it, as well as specific temporal pathways relating to decolonization or other political processes (p. 272).
While several chapters show the clear strategic interests of the British, American, and Soviet governments in securing access to bauxite deposits, others identify instances of divergent interests between states and corporations, even where one might have expected strategic alignments. In particular, both Robin S. Gendron and Bradley Cross show how Alcan clearly failed to secure Canadian government support in its negotiations with Guyana under Forbes Burnham, and with Guinea under Sekou Touré, leading it to lose valuable mining claims in those postcolonial independent countries and then to withdraw to Australia.
Other chapters explore challenges of development, focusing on the nuanced difficulties faced by bauxite-producing states such as Greece (discussed by Leda Papastefanaki), Jamaica (discussed by Lou Anne Barclay and Norman Girvan), and Guinea (expertly discussed by Bonnie Campbell) as they tried to develop national aluminum industries under external political constraints arising from global financial institutions and structural readjustment programs. In another case of thwarted expectations—and contrary to John Stuckey's classic 1983 study Vertical Integration and Joint Ventures in the Aluminum Industry—Pål Thonstad Sandvik shows how Norsk Hydro got by for decades without its own in-house bauxite mining and alumina refining operations, moving to acquire Vale only in 2010. Here we see some of the tensions between rational market behavior, the options available at any given time, and the mismatch between investment cycles and market cycles.
Despite the many strengths of this book, though, two aspects are surprisingly underdeveloped. First are the environmental and human rights impacts associated with bauxite mining in terms of loss of agricultural land and forests to strip mining, the impact of alumina refining in leaving behind massive red-mud lakes and water and air pollution, and the huge amounts of land and villages lost to hydroelectric dams around the world, not to mention greenhouse gases produced. These concerns, raised in three pages in the introduction, are central to only one chapter, in which Samarendra Das and Felix Padel draw on their important book, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel (2010). Environmental regulation and human rights issues are key problems facing this industry in the future and should be central to any discussion of the history of the global bauxite industry.
The second absence is any exploration of the cultural history of aluminum and the world-changing consumption side of the story. The uses to which aluminum has been put range from crucial military applications to consumer goods, such that what might be called the cultural political economy of aluminum's uses is central to the histories of modernity, material culture, and uneven forms of modernization around the world. These are topics I focus on in Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (2014), and if I were teaching on this subject I would find much to be gained by using all three of these books together.
