"Beyond Security and Scarcity: The Rise of Jamaica’s Bauxite Industry in the Cold War"

In the early Cold War, three multinational corporations made Jamaica into the world’s largest producer of bauxite, the ore required to smelt aluminum. How and why did a small British colony become a magnet for North American industrial capital? Although scholars have pointed to the strategic significance of aluminum and the scarcity of bauxite in Canada and the United States to explain the island’s economic transformation, this paper argues that the rise of the bauxite industry in Jamaica had little to do with either. Drawing on corporate records and state archives in Jamaica, the United States, and Britain, I show how mineral extraction in Jamaica was embedded in a larger Anglo-American imperial project, as British colonial officials opened the island and the wider empire to U.S. public and private investment. Within the wider British Empire, the production of colonial commodities like oil, rubber, copper, and bauxite became crucial dollar-earning assets, buoying Britain’s postwar economic recovery. In Jamaica, the dearth of British public and private capital for colonial development projects made it expedient for colonial officials to present U.S. public and private capital investment as the foundation for colonial economic development. For the United States, public and private investment in the island’s minerals was above all about breaking Alcoa’s monopoly power in the aluminum industry. How, then, did this wider transimperial political and economic conjuncture fade into the background in favor of the logics of security and scarcity? Taking Jamaica as a point of departure, I reflect more broadly on how firms and state actors use the politics of scarcity and security to naturalize the global expansion of business and to link private pecuniary gain to public goods.