Global Gambits: Big Steel and the U.S. Quest for Manganese

by Tyler Priest

Overview

From the 1890s to the 1960s, U.S. steel makers imported more than 70 million tons of high-grade manganese ore, a ferroalloy indispensable to steel production but rare in the United States. Using a commodity approach to highlight the webs of interest and conflict over raw materials that studies of bilateral diplomacy often overlook, Priest reveals the interconnected histories of far-flung mining regions around the globe and the unexamined role of the major U.S. steel companies in the U.S. search for foreign materials. The big manganese mines would emerge first in Brazil, Soviet Georgia, and India, and later in Gabon and South Africa, in a world market that was extremely competitive and inherently unstable.

Market instability, caused in part by consumer control over the manganese trade, stimulated direct U.S. investments in mining beginning in the 1920s. During the 1930s and 1940s, concerns about access to manganese increasingly shaped U.S. mineral and foreign lending policies, which by the Cold War focused on supporting infrastructure development linked to strategic mining districts. Big manganese projects in Brazil and Gabon, undertaken by Bethlehem and U.S. Steel, respectively, dramatically restructured world supply and demonstrated the ways in which U.S. investment and aid imposed an export orientation in producing nations and widened the gulf between industrial and extractive regions of the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780275977078
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/30/2003
Series:	International History
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

TYLER PRIEST is an independent scholar and partner in History International, LLC, a consulting firm specializing in corporate histories. He is the author of Offshore Pioneers: Brown & Root and the History of Offshore Oil and Gas.

Table of Contents

Introduction
The "Starch in the Steel": Manganese Metallurgy and Commerce
Far-Flung Sources: The Creation of a World Market, 1880-1914
"More Than a Pawn in the Game of War": Global Instabilities, 1905-1919
Filling Big Orders: The Diversification of Supply, 1919-1930
Internationalism vs. Self-Sufficiency: The Making of U.S. Mineral Policy, 1919-1939
Tempting the Brazilians: The Diplomacy of Minerals and Steel, 1930-1945
Extending the Quest: The Crisis of the New Order, 1945-1949
New Frontiers: Restructuring World Supply, 1948-1965
Epilogue and Conclusion
Bibliography
Tables
Maps