Abstract

"From Bootle to Bolivia: internationalising British industrial decline in the 1970s"

Olivia Saunders, Liverpool John Moores University (O.R.Saunders@ljmu.ac.uk)

For nearly half of the twentieth century, the British company, Williams, Harvey, ensured Britain’s predominant position in the world smelting industry by owning the only smelter technologically capable of processing of high-grade Bolivian tin ores. After a brief period of profound crisis, however, the company’s plant, in Bootle, near Liverpool, north-west England, closed, with the company entering liquidation shortly thereafter. For scholars working on British (de)industrial history, there has been little examination of the north-west tin-smelting industry, despite Britain’s predominant role therein. Equally, scholarship on Bolivian mining focuses on nationalisation during the 1950s, and international efforts, led by the United States, West Germany, and the Inter-American Development Bank, at restructuring the industry during the 1960s. Some attention was given to relationship between the British company and the Bolivian mining industry during the first half of the twentieth century, but there is no understanding of the impact of this later period of profound change in Bolivia, including the industry’s radical restructuring and the development of its own domestic smelter, in precipitating the firm’s demise.
Blending business, technological, and industrial history, this project unites these disparate narratives, analysing the interplay between competing local, national, and international exigencies in explaining the ultimate failure of Britain’s largest tin smelting firm. This had social, political, and industrial consequences, with the firm a large employer and located in the political constituency of former prime minister, Harold Wilson. In Bolivia, the construction of a domestic smelter was decades in the making, bringing to fruition the long-standing aspiration to be no longer dependent on foreign technological expertise. Drawing on extensive multi-national archival material, this paper emphasises the importance of the international and technological aspects of British industrial decline, explaining the demise of a firm that was as entrenched in the local community as it was in global markets.