A Global History of Gold Rushes [Hardcover]

Nothing set the world in motion like gold. Between the discovery of California placer gold in 1848 and the rush to Alaska fifty years later, the search for the precious yellow metal accelerated worldwide circulations of people, goods, capital, and technologies. A Global History of Gold Rushes brings together historians of the United States, Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific World to tell the rich story of these nineteenth century gold rushes from a global perspective. Gold was central to the growth of capitalism: it whetted the appetites of empire builders, mobilized the integration of global markets and economies, profoundly affected the environment, and transformed large-scale migration patterns. Together these essays tell the story of fifty years that changed the world.

Benjamin Mountford,Senior Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, is the author of Britain, China, and Colonial Australia and coeditor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World. He was formerly a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University (2017-18). 
 
Stephen Tuffnell,Associate Professor of Modern US History at the University of Oxford, is currently completingEmigrant Foreign Relations: Independence and Interdependence in the Atlantic, c. 1789–1902. He researches US history from a global perspective.

"At long last we have the gold rush phenomenon presented in a truly global and comparative fashion—from California to Alaska, and from eastern Australia to Ghana. This collection of essays by esteemed scholars changes the way we think about any particular gold rush as well as the complex social, economic, and political manifestations they brought about." —David Igler, author ofThe Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush