-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Scott Frickel, William R. Freudenburg, Mining the Past: Historical Context and the Changing Implications of Natural Resource Extraction, Social Problems, Volume 43, Issue 4, 1 November 1996, Pages 444–466, https://doi.org/10.2307/3096954
Close - Share Icon Share
Abstract
Residents and leaders of rural or less-developed regions often believe that the exploitation of natural resources will provide an antidote to regional poverty, but the research literature on the topic is decidedly mixed. While many development economists have predicted regional benefits from resource extraction, other analysts have differed; in particular, many dependency scholars have predicted increasing “underdevelopment,” and a number of natural resource sociologists have predicted a more specific problem of “overadaptation.” Obviously, it is not likely that all of these competing expectations are equally accurate. To clarify the conditions under which extraction leads to prosperity or poverty, it is necessary to devote greater attention to the ways in which the developmental dynamics of resource extraction have changed over time — and if possible, to do so in a way that identifies relatively specific causal factors. As an initial step in that direction, this paper calls attention to four such factors, all of which have changed substantially over the past several centuries — historically contingent levels of resource-extraction capacities, pre-existing competition, linkage specialization, and transportation. For all of these factors, the overall pattern of change has been toward decreasing the likelihood that natural resource extraction will lead to local or regional “development.” The net effect is that expectations for local prosperity appear to have been reasonably accurate in earlier years, up through roughly the first half of the 19th century, but increasingly inaccurate thereafter. This preliminary argument is illustrated with three case studies of some of the most “successful” extraction-based development experiences we have been able to identify from the past four centuries, involving British coal mines of the 17th-18th centuries, upper Midwest lead mines of the 19th century, and offshore oil extraction along the U.S. Gulf Coast in the 20th. We conclude by noting the relevance of the experiences from earlier centuries for resource-related decisions of the 21”.
