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About

This blog would like to be a space for communicate and share the projects of the new Working Group Labour in mining, born inside the European Labour History Network.

Where all began

The founding meeting of the ELHN took place at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) on 12 October 2013. The forty scholars who gathered in Amsterdam, belonging to research institutions, archives and journals based in various European countries, felt the need to increase the cooperation among labour history scholars, share knowledge and (digital) material, create a platform for future collective research, and organize conferences and seminars. The Network includes Europe-based scholars (professors, post-doc and PhD researchers, post-graduate students) but seeks to connect with scholars based outside Europe.
The 1st ELHN Conference was held in Turin in 2015 and 2nd ELHN Conference was held in Paris in 2017. In order to structure the network and overcome fragmentation, the key-role of working groups was underlined. Some working groups were proposed and took shape. Among others: Long term perspectives on remuneration; Pre-industrial Labour; Feminist Labour History; Industrial heritage and structural change; workers politics and social movements; Imperial labour history; Labour in mining.

The ELHN Working Group “Labour in Mining”

The EHLN working group “Labour in Mining” aims at creating and expanding existing, more or less formal and informal contacts and networks of scholars with an interest in labour in mining sector in Europe and around the world.
Mining has special characteristics not only for its kind of jobs (typically in the underground), its morbidity and workplace accidents, its location linked to the existence of resources and migratory phenomena, the high potential for conflict and harsh working conditions. Its peculiarity has given to labour markets of the sector a kind of isolation in relation to other productive activities.
These characteristics have given a particular evolution, reproducing itself internally (through the own families), and perpetuating cultural moulds that have continued along time. The study of the evolution of the labour relations in mining is useful not only for knowing the transformations of labour in this sector, but also for elaborating more our knowledge of labour history in general, and in some labour markets, characterized by some grade of isolation, in particular.
On the labour activities in mining, we have a wide literature in the past and in the present. It is a topic on which it has been done an important work compiling sources and research. But above all it suffers from having been focused in a local scope and having formed several cliché on the miner´s behaviour. Besides, there are some elements hardly studied. As some examples, the role of the women in the direct activities and in the preservation of the living conditions in the mining hubs; the incidence of professional illnesses (silicosis, hydrargirism, hookworm, lead poisonism, etc.) and, specially, a European´s lack of vision about the sector as a whole, relating the evolution of the more relevant mining countries and hubs.

Topics and perspectives

We would like to discuss research related to a broad range of themes and concepts in economic, social and cultural labour history of mining including but not limited to the following:

  • The intersection of class, race, gender, age, global inequality, etc. in labour in mining; Dual work (agricultural and mining), migrations, discrimination.
  • Labour relations: labour organisation, developing of the wage earner work, wages and remuneration systems, hiring and scientific organisation of labour.
  • Technological development and evolution of the job markets: from the steam to the electricity, from the gravimetric concentration systems to the differential flotation, the underground work and the open-cast work, labour problems, incidence in the health and conflicts, technological change and mining conjunctures.
  • Living conditions and inequality. Occupational health and safety in mining: mortality, morbidity, pollution and sanitary institutions.
  • Mining communities: characteristics, problems, urban penalty.
  • Strategies of the management, working movement, industrial paternalism, truck system, conflicts, trade unions.
  • Industrial archaeology of mining activities, immaterial patrimony, culture.
  • Archives of mining activities.

We wish to contribute in the relations between the researchers in this field, in the establishment of research lines and a frame to exchange information and knowledge, publications and other initiatives in this field. Moreover, we are offering a support to databases download and consultation on the mining labour, accesible for the Academy. We also aim at the exchange of knowledge about primary sources, archives, and literature related to the history of labour in mining.

Activities

LiM-WG is engaged in many activities in and outside of the European Labour History Networks. The group organises workshops, conferences and sessions both alone and in collaboration with other WGs and scholars. These are the main events organised since today:

  • 5th ELHN Conference in Uppsala, 2024: 4 sessions (Mining Mobilities across the Globe: Labour, Science, and Knowledge Circulation in Mining (15th-21st Century) ; Mining–Agriculture Relationships: Influences on labour organisation and labour markets) Find more information here
  • 4th ELHN 2nd WORCK Conference in Vienna, 2021: 4 sessions (Environmental and Social Impacts of Mining in Time and Space I and II; Economic and Social Impacts of Mining. The case of Spain & Case Studies from USA, Africa, Europe)
  •  3rd ELHN Conference in Amsterdam 2019: 2 sessions (4 panels) (Living Conditions in Mining Towns in History ; a joint session “Health Environment and Labour in Mining” with the WG “Occupational Health and Environmental Labour History (19th-21th c.)”
  • Patronage of the Summer course on “Minería histórica y nueva minería. De la historia socioeconómica al siglo XXI” (“Historical mining and new mining. From socioeconomic history to the 21th century”), La Rábida (Huelva, Spain), 20 – 23 July, 2021.
  • Interdisciplinary conference “Futures in the History of Deindustrialisation”, Bologna, October 13-15, 2022 jointly with ELHN Working Groups: “Memory and Deindustrialisation”, “Workers, Labour and Labour History in East-Central Europe”; the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna; the Department of Education of University of Roma Tre; the Museo del Patrimonio Industriale Bologna; the Italian Labour History Association (SISLAV).

What’s always going on (and you might also contribute to!)

Articles Selection (seasonal, every 4 months): Periodical posts listing interesting readings (mostly academic articles, but also blog posts) published in the previous 4 months, related to Mining History and similar disciplines: https://lim.hypotheses.org/734

Books selection (annual): Post published every year in december listing interesting books published in the year, related to Mining History and similar disciplines. Authors are invited to notify their publications in order to be highlighted. You can find some exemples here

You are warmly invited to send us your suggestions!

The Young Mining Historians’ Corner (Monthly, published issues): Periodical post about young scholars’ researches (PhD candidate, Young Doctors, Professors or Lecturers), consisting in short abstracts about their thesis projets, thesis, ongoing researches related to mining history and similar disciplines. 

Early Career Researchers are highly invited to send us proposals (filling this YMHC_Form) at labourinmining@gmail.com.

Collaborative Projects “Database of Databases in Mining HistoryIn 2021, we launched a collaborative project listing open access sources.  Find the database here. You can contribute by sending your suggestion to labourinmining@gmail.com

The Coordinators

Francesca Sanna (francesca.sanna@univ-tlse2.fr), Assistant Professor at University Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, FRAMESPA. Her research focuses on scientific management, labour and business history, particularly in the domain of contemporary mining industry. She holds a PhD in History and Civilisation (Université de Paris Cité) and a Specialisation degree in Industrial Heritage Management (University of Padova). Find more about Francesca here.

José Joaquín García Gómez (josejgg@ual.es) Degree in Economics (University of Valencia, 2003), M.Sc. in International Business Management (Escuela de Organización Industrial, 2005) and PhD in Economic History (University of Alicante, 2013). From September 2009 to May 2015 he was Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Economic at the University of Alicante. He is currently Full Professor in the Department of Economics (area of Economic History) at the University of Almería. His main research interests are living standards during the industrialization and the history of Spanish mining. He is the main researcher (IP) in a research project for the Ministry of Science.

Gabriele Marcon I am an early modern historian whose interests lie at the intersection between labor history and the history of science. My research offers new insights into the mobility of workers and the construction of scientific expertise in early modern Europe. My doctoral dissertation – titled Transnational Expertise. German miners in Renaissance Italy – builds on a comparative study of the mobility of German miners to the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Florence with the aim to uncover the relationship between labor mobility and the circulation of knowledge across early modern extractive economies. The challenge moving forward is to explore the circulation, adaptation, and contestation of scientific expertise across Europe, the British Empire, and the Iberian World from a global and comparative perspective in the period 1500-1800.

Former Coordinators

Miguel Á. Pérez de Perceval Verde (perceval@um.es), professor of “History and Economic Institutions” at the University of Murcia and principal investigator of the project “Business history, markets and productive development in contemporary Spanish mining”. He has published on different aspects of work activity in the mines.

Leda Papastefanaki (lpapast@uoi.gr), associate professor of “Economic and Social History” at the University of Ioannina, Greece and collaborate faculty member at IMS/FORTH, scientific responsible of the research project “Mining Landscapes in Greece, 19th-20th c.”. She has published on industrial and mining history, labour history and gender in Greece (19th-20th centuries).

History of coordination commitee

2017: Miguel Á. Pérez de Perceval Verde, Leda Papastefanaki and Francesca Sanna
2019: Miguel Á. Pérez de Perceval Verde stepped down. José Joaquín García Gómez became coordinator with Leda Papastefanaki and Francesca Sanna. 
2020: Gabriele Marcon became coordinator with Leda Papastefanaki and Francesca Sanna and José Joaquín García Gómez.
2021: Leda Papastefanaki stepped down after being elected as Chair of the ELHN.

Subscribe to the newsletter by sending an email to labourinmining@gmail.com ! We periodically send a Newsletter to our members. In this newsletter we inform about many things, not only related to our activities. We are always interested to receive information about CFP, Seminars, Workshops, Lectures, Publications, Expos, Events related to mining history or similar disciplines. If you organize some, please send us the program or a small abstract. Find here all previous newsletters.