"Empire of Metals: The Imperial Institute, the British Empire, and the Global Mining Industry in the Interwar Years"

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the mining industry was an ostensibly “globalized” one. With capitalists and experts – many of whom were from Britain, the United States, Australia, and other locations in the broader “Anglo” world – traveling across the world discovering, extracting, investing in, and profiting from the production of metalliferous ores, the existence of national borders and boundaries provided few impediments to their activities. World War One, however, transformed this reality. Understanding that the access to rare metals as well as advanced mining technology could be a matter of national or imperial security, powers such as Britain and the United States began to look inwards to access these critical resources. In the case of the United Kingdom this led to a new drive among policymakers and businessmen to rely on the empire for its needs for metals. It also meant centralizing forces that, until the war, had remained solely under the purview of commercial agents. This paper examines how and why the Imperial Institute, an organization created in the 1880s to promote the broader British Empire’s industrial and commercial products, became central to this process, as well as how its base in London – now the site of Imperial College – became the center of Britain’s efforts to secure and ultimately “sell” its “empire of metals” on the global stage.