In the 1880s, an estimated 4,000 people lived in the Kinta District of Malaya. Twenty years later, with the discovery of tin deposits, the population had increased to 123,000, comprised mainly of Chinese immigrants who found employment as coolies in the open-cast mines. Although the tin industry was gradually brought under the control of the British colonial government, the lives of the workers largely remained beyond its reach. This study of the Chinese working people in Kinta over a 100-year period explores how their lives have been affected by these changes and how they have adjusted in order to meet the challenges posed by changing situations.

The eminent historian and author of The Rise of King Cotton uncovers the centuries-old story of tin mining in Southern England. Tin mining has existed in Cornwall and parts of Devon since before the Romans arrived in Britain. In this book, historian Anthony Burton explores the region’s tin mining industry from its earliest period through to the present day. A specialist in the history of technology, Burton examines the evolution of extraction methods from primitive pick and shovel operations to the later use of explosives, the rise of steam power, and beyond. Burton also looks at the changing politics and economics of the tin mining industry over the centuries.

In this powerful anthropological study of a Bolivian tin mining town, Nash explores the influence of modern industrialization on the traditional culture of Quechua-and-Aymara-speaking Indians.

Ten original essays discuss changes in the life, politics, and culture of Bolivia since the revolution of 1952.

"Behind Barbed Wire looks behind the façade to ask what it was really like to be moved to, and live in, a 'New Village'. Tan, who himself lived in New Villages growing up, combines archival sources and oral history to give us a rounded account . . . We need Tan's book, because up to now the outsider's view has predominated, and outsiders have their own agenda." Karl Hack, in the Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society This unique book revisits the moment in the Malayan Emergency when some 500,000 women, children and men were uprooted from their homes and moved into new settlements, guarded day and night by police and troops. A majority were rural Chinese: market gardeners, shopkeepers, rice farmers, tin miners and rubber tappers who had long made Malaya their home and had lived through the hardships of the Japanese Occupation. Based upon newly accessible archival materials and painstaking multilingual interviews with more than 80 informants in four New Villages, Tan Teng Phee rewrites the history of the Emergency, exposing the voices of those at the heart of this lauded ‘social experiment’. In Francis Loh’s words, these were ordinary villagers ‘caught in the crossfire between the British security forces and the Malayan Communist Party’ whose lives were turned inside-out and re-ordered completely, with daily curfews, body searches and food controls alongside the carrots and sticks of registration, (re)education, sanitation, psychological warfare and swift punishment. Highlighting the disciplinary aims of British policy, as well as the ways in which villagers resisted this discipline through ‘weapons of the weak’, this book forms a unique history from below of the Malayan Emergency, and of a resettlement programme which shaped the social and geographical landscape of Malaysia for generations to come.

This volume represents an edited selection of papers presented at the International symposium on the geology of tin deposits held in Nanning City in October 1984. It documents a great advance in our knowledge of tin deposits, particularly of the People's Republic of China. Details are presented in English for the first time on the major tin-polymetallic sulphide deposits of Dachang and Gejiu, which bear similarities to the deposits of Tasmania, but are little known to the geological community outside of China. The publication of this volume was sponsored by the United Nations ESCAP Regional Mineral Resources Development Centre (RMRDC), now a Regional Mineral Resources Development Project (RMRDP) within ESCAP. The Centre had previously published a report on the Symposium in Nanning City and the following field trip to the Dachang tin-polymetallic sulphide deposit of Guangxi, entitled "Report on the International Symposium on the Geology of Tin Deposits: Nanning and Dachang, China, 27 October - 8 November 1984". It is my privilege to acknowledge the help provided by Dr. J. F. McDivitt and Dr. H. W. Gebert, co-ordinator of ESCAP-RMRDC.

Only recently has the role of Chinese minorities at the forefront of Southeast Asia's rapid economic growth attracted world attention. Yet interactions between Chinese and Southeast Asians are longstanding and intense, reaching back a thousand years and making it difficult, if not specious, to attempt to disentangle what is Chinese and what is indigenous in much of Southeast Asian culture. Sojourners and Settlers, now back in print, written by some of the most distinguished specialists in the field, demonstrates the depth of that relationship. Contributors: Leonard Blussé, Mary Somers Heidhues, Jamie C. Mackie, Anthony Reid, Craig Reynolds, Claudine Salmon, G. William Skinner, Wang Gungwu, O. W. Wolters.

Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire provides the first wide-ranging environmental history of the heyday of European imperialism, from the late nineteenth century to the end of the colonial era. It focuses on the ecological dimensions of the explosive growth of tropical commodity production, global trade, and modern resource management-transformations that still visibly shape our world today-and how they were related to broader social, cultural, and political developments in Europe's colonies. Covering the overseas empires of all the major European powers, Corey Ross argues that tropical environments were not merely a stage on which conquest and subjugation took place, but were an essential part of the colonial project, profoundly shaping the imperial enterprise even as they were shaped by it. The story he tells is not only about the complexities of human experience, but also about people's relationship with the ecosystems in which they were themselves embedded: the soil, water, plants, and animals that were likewise a part of Europe's empire. Although it shows that imperial conquest rarely represented a sudden bout of ecological devastation, it nonetheless demonstrates that modern imperialism marked a decisive and largely negative milestone for the natural environment. By relating the expansion of modern empire, global trade, and mass consumption to the momentous ecological shifts that they entailed, this book provides a historical perspective on the vital nexus of social, political, and environmental issues that we face in the twenty-first-century world.

Spanning the years 1840-1875, Beyond the Boundaries focuses on the settlement of Upper Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, telling the story of reluctant pioneers who attempted to establish a decent measure of comfort, control, and security in what was in many ways a hostile environment. Moving beyond the technological history of the period found in his previous book Cradle to the Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines (OUP 1991), Lankton here focuses on the people of this region and how the copper mining affected their daily lives. A truly first-rate social history, Beyond the Boundaries will appeal to historians of the frontier and of Michigan and the Great Lakes region, as well as historians of technology, labor, and everyday life.