A ‘Lengthy Digression’: Why Mining Lagged Elsewhere

This chapter provides the mining history of the mountains of the rest of the world. It begins with England in which major silver discoveries took place in Bere Ferrers or Bere Ferris, a valley of the Tamar River in North Devon, southwest of Dartmoor, and at Combe Martin in the north after the mid-thirteenth century. However, English mines were challenging as they were physically distant from the central arteries of international trade of continental Europe and the commercial cities with continental catchment areas. This chapter also talks about silver mining that flourished in the Persian Province of Khorasan, the Samanid region of Transoxiana, and the Hindu Kush. These are the lands of the most spectacular mountain heights, where mountains piled up one behind another and mountain development assumes its grandest forms. It ends with mining history in India in which its mining exploits did not compete with the achievements of European mining regions. Mining in Zawar endured technical difficulties. Geologist Bagghi states that miners worked on hard siliceous quarzitic ore bodies, where drilling today calls for the use of tungsten carbide bits.

Capitalist Profits of Mining Corporations

This chapter focuses on capitalist profits. It explains how mining corporations were the entrepreneurial agents par excellence of the medieval mining world without which mining could not thrive. But balance sheets of corporations are simply nonexistent. This fact raises questions about whether or not mining corporations enjoyed the necessary conditions for generating profits. Capitalist profit is a matter of money but also a matter of legal, economic, and political preconditions guaranteeing that corporations enjoy a relatively stable and long-term investment climate. It is only in the examination of the sum of these relations that the essence of capitalist profits is to be found, even if mining history only allows to identify what Pierre Vilar once called “the general feeling” of these relations.

World Mining Regions before the Rise of Modern Capitalism

This chapter talks about how geology not only sets in motion the primary “law of attraction” and pulled miners into the wombs of mountains, but also how geography cultivated and turned excitement in mining into an economic force. Geography initiated the conditions for turning ore deposits into the underground wealth of Europe. The results were astonishing: the low elevations of Europe's mountains were transformed into world mining regions. The chapter describes mining regions, such as the central Alps and Lombardy that constituted a world mining region from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Mining fields extended into the Austrian Alps and the territori montuosi that encircle Lake Lugano, between Lake Maggiore and Lake Como. Later in the fifteenth century, mining fields shifted slightly to the east, in Padova, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, Feltre, and Belluno, north of Venice, controlled by diverse società tedesca.