Overseas investment and the professional advance of British metal mining engineers, 1851-1914.

The article focuses on the emergence, professionalization and education of a British-based mining and metallurgical elite in the years between 1851 and 1914. The last few years have witnessed a growing appreciation among students of international business of the extensive British involvement in overseas mining in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In examining the leading role of the "City of London," in mining finance and speculation, J.J. Van Helten has shown that between 1880 and 1913, some 8,408 companies were registered in Great Britain for mining and mine exploration abroad. Many of these companies were of little consequence, and it is hard to estimate with any precision the amount of cash actually invested. Nonetheless, it is clear that the overseas mining investment boom was of great consequence and that Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia, North America and South America all proved attractive to British mining entrepreneurs and investors. British-owned companies, for example, accounted for 60 per cent of the world's output of gold in 1898, and by 1914, 20 of the world's largest copper mines, a quarter of the tin output of the Straits Settlement and Malay States and 60 per cent of the Chilean nitrate industry was owned and controlled by British-based firms.