Mines, Drills, and Energy

Abstract

Traditionally, a nation’s security rested on possessing a military strong enough to deter or defeat invaders, and self-sufficiency in food and mineral resources. Strategic minerals were those smelted and hammered into weapons or coin. Those strategic minerals of the pre-industrial age included tin, copper, gold, silver, and iron ore. Nature’s uneven distribution of minerals has shaped the course of history. Over the millennia, nations that lacked natural resources often conquered other peoples to get them. In the pre-industrial era, the most successful conquerors were the European states which subjugated the entire western hemisphere and knit the world’s far corners within an increasingly dense trade network in search of minerals and other sources of wealth. But this first great wave of global imperialism died with the American Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the Latin American revolutions of the early nineteenth century.