Upper Thames Street, site of 27, at Paul's Walk, previously Paul's Wharf, headquarters of major copper firms in the 19th century (Tehmina Goskar)

On 9 November I will be participating in the Historical Metallurgy Society‘s Research in Progress meeting in Sheffield. The day promises to be extremely varied where experimental archaeologists, historians, scientists and others will be getting together to share various aspects of their work. Subjects will range from the excavation of a medieval smithy in Oxfordshire to the lead and copper ‘isotope signatures’ of North American native copper.

Read the draft programme for information on all the contributors (opens or downloads PDF).

My contribution to the day will focus on recent work I have been conducting on the business archives relating to major copper concerns that operated smelting and refining works in Swansea. These copper archives add essential information and colour to a broad picture historians have been building up of the global copper industry, predominantly in the 18th and 19th centuries, since the 1950s. However many of these histories have been reliant on runs of statistics from mining and geological journals, import and export information from mercantile shipping records and occasionally, official records government records and occasionally, correspondence and letter collections of prominent figures such as Thomas Williams of Anglesey and the Vivians.

Business archives are found in many county and special collections all over the country. Their content often relates to more than one firm and more than just local activity. For example, the Grenfell Collection held by the Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University, comprises records relating to their head quarters at 27 Upper Thames Street, London and many of their dealings abroad, including with Spain, in addition to important detail about their major smelting works at Upper and Middle Bank in Swansea.

My Research in Progress paper aims to give an outline and a few examples of the way in which these archives can be used and linked together to reconstruct the elements of the historic global copper industry that remain obscured in mainstream histories that have not delved into these records in any great detail.

Download abstract: Reconstructing the historic global copper industry from business archives (PDF, 43KB).

Aberfulais Falls, near Neath, Wales, site of early copperworking, then tinplate industry (Tehmina Goskar)

Having had the opportunity to work on various industrial heritage projects over the years and now focusing both my research and professional work in this area, I am publishing what I consider to be five key areas that should be addressed as part of any industrial heritage project. They are particularly aimed at groups and organisations that want to think about promoting their site or collections beyond the locality and beyond immediate interest groups and traditional audiences. They are also aimed at any knowledge exchange collaboration or project that wish to raise awareness of a particular historic industry and its impact on people and societies.

It makes reference to examples based on Welsh copper industrial heritage as that is the project on which I have most recently worked. The Top 5 was originally written in July 2010.

You may freely make use of this guide provided you ensure full attribution is made to me, Tehmina Goskar, and its source on this website.

Top 5 considerations for promoting industrial history and heritage

by Tehmina Goskar, July 2010.

1. What research and interpretation themes could be chosen?

Focusing on an industry over time provides several linked opportunities to explore the history of individuals, communities and human relationships. Possible themes:

• Material science, technology and engineering (usual focus of industrial history); raw materials, products, specialisation and skills. Associated industrial history: other metals, ceramics, telecommunications, coal.
• Communications: rail, sea, migration. Where did the industry take people? New World migration when work in Britain begins to dry up.
• Economic history: profits, losses, investment, taxes, changes in supply and demand, competition.
• Social history: the creation of the super-rich (copper magnates), jobs for the workers, social mobility.    
• Was it a man’s world? Gender roles. What did women do?
• Health and welfare: effects of pollutants and physical labour, role of child labour, employee benefits (housing, school, education).
• Political history: links to African and Caribbean slavery, labour movements.
• Cultural contact: culture and commerce between South Wales, rest of UK, e.g. Birmingham, the New Worlds and Asia. Massive international impact of copperworking in Swansea is this history’s unique selling point (‘Imagine a world without copper…’)
• Sites and archaeology: promoting a sense of place (it could only have happened here), making the intangible real.
• Associated natural history: of minerals, environments and landscapes before and after.
• Contemporary resonances: what can we recognise? Urban regeneration. Globalisation. Scramble for natural resources, causes of political and cultural change; consequences when the bottom falls out of a mass market.

2. How can we communicate this history?

In addition to traditional modes of communicating academic research, such as publications (print and online), conferences and workshops, industrial history can be disseminated in a variety of other ways, many of which also offer the opportunity for audiences to feed back:

• Online. Searchable/discoverable digital resources/exhibitions comprising images, textual descriptions and narratives or analysis, audio and video podcasts (e.g. monthly podcast introducing an aspect of the history, can double up as an educational resource), 3D visualisations, games, spatial representation of data: maps/plans.
• Museum/gallery-based. Travelling exhibition (already planned?) to take history out of locality. Handling collections for schools and visitors.
• Education. Through courses, or contributions of course content (including elearning) relating to the subject or aspects of it for continuing education, undergraduate and postgraduate courses, school curricula; informal educational opportunities through public lectures, tours (e.g. Brian Perrins’ tours of the Hafod site), resource-based learning at local libraries.
• Documenting the research project. Newsletters to stakeholders, blogging, tweeting. Fact/object of the week…
• Offering content in alternative languages.

3. To whom should we communicate this history?

Apart from academic and enthusiast historians and archaeologists of (modern) Wales, Britain, and the industrial revolutions, this history would appeal to:

• Local communities and visitors to the area, e.g. local libraries and archive users, tourist information centres.
• Scholars and students of material culture, social economics, historical geography, globalisation and natural history.
• Professionals in allied organisations such as local curators and librarians, industrial heritage sites such as the Cornwall and West Devon World Heritage Site, Blaenavon World Heritage Site (inc. Big Pit National Mining Museum), TICCIH (The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage), ERIH (the European Route of Industrial Heritage), Social History Curators Group, etc.
• Family historians wishing to find out about an ancestor.
• Local historians, not just in South Wales but also in the places linked to it by the copper industry (esp. abroad).
• School children and lifelong learners (see above).
• Journalists and broadcasters who will help promote the stories.
• Writers, poets and artists who will take inspiration from the subject.

4. Who else could write about this history?

Stephen Hughes’ study, Copperopolis. Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea (RCAHMW, 2000), is arguably the classic work on the copper and allied industries in Swansea from the 15^th to 20^th centuries. The academic output from this project will add important new resources to the bibliography. As this project coincides with urban regeneration and conservation initiatives lead by Swansea Council (ebook on Hafod Copperworks: http://www.swansea.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=35750 c2010) the opportunity to invite (some) contributions from those other than the project team would give the added benefit of diversifying audiences and providing more ambassadors for the project. All contributions would require editorial and quality control. Examples include:

• Experts in specific areas from other organisations.
• Suitably qualified or trained volunteers who could also contribute to cataloguing collections.
• Students, as assignments or work placements.
• Contribution of opinions and memories via website comments or oral history.
•  Local and cultural journalists and writers.
• Artists interpreting the subject in alternative media, e.g. songs, poems, sculpture, acting.

5. How can history become heritage?  

By sharing it with as many people as possible.

Participation will encourage ambassadorship and word of mouth promotion of the subject. Inviting comments and thoughts from various audiences will improve how this history is communicated while also giving others a sense of ownership of it. A sense of place can be generated through a common understanding of the past, and a common desire to see it perpetuated in the future. Written and communicated history needs to be tied in closely with the physical remains to make this happen. The Welsh copper industries’ impact on communities across the UK and the world means that this history is their heritage too, and efforts should be made to communicate at least some of it to those audiences as well.

I wrote this short essay for a hypothetical radio programme when I applied to the BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers competition in December 2010. I was fortunate enough to be chosen as a finalist out of over 1000 applicants and attend a thought-provoking workshop. Although I did not make the final ten I wanted to share the work I prepared for the competition here. Next I will post my idea for a radio series on the history of copper.

A visit to the Leach Pottery, St Ives, Cornwall, May 2009

Enlightened design: Leach Pottery Standard Ware mug and Turmeric/Grape Virginia Creeper silk dupion by Clarissa Hulse

An unpromising walk from the centre of town brings you to an equally unpromising house at Higher Stennack. But don’t be discouraged. Venture in and you too will become students of the two most significant pioneers of artist pottery: Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. The pair established the pottery in 1920 after they met while Leach was an apprentice potter in Japan. As you step quietly around the recently restored studio and galleries, around the climbing kiln and along the delicate wooden platforms you can’t fail to become absorbed in the ideals of functional beauty that Leach spent so many years learning and teaching. The early decades of studio pottery in Britain embodied a marriage of philosophy and thought from east and west.

While wandering around the galleries you begin to learn how to read the pots. They were not just exquisite to look at. Leach created objects that were statements against the shallow conceits of many fine art ceramics. Now I could begin to understand what he meant by the standard forms of unity, spontaneity and simplicity (explained in “A Potter’s Book,” 1940). There is enlightenment in simple design, colour, texture and shape. This museum is dedicated to keeping this philosophy alive and so who could resist bringing some of it back home?

This ethics question was originally posed by Caitlin Griffiths of the Museums Association in September 2006. I was undertaking continuing professional development for my AMA (Associateship of the Museums Association) at the time and felt, with my role in both academic research and heritage, that I had strong views on the subject. My response was published in the October 2006 issue of Museums Journal. I was also undertaking my PhD at the time.

Question: Although it is clearly unacceptable to acquire or display illicit material, is it acceptable to use this material for academic research?

Originally published in: Comment (ethics): ‘Although it is clearly unacceptable to acquire or display illicit material, is it acceptable to use this material for academic research?’, Museums Journal, 105 (10) (October 2006).

My response

If it is morally unacceptable for a museum to acquire and display
illicit objects then it is likewise unacceptable to conduct academic
research on them. If the tide of ‘trade’ in illegally acquired
objects is to be stopped, or at least allayed, then researchers and
universities must unequivocally take the ethical higher ground. There
is no reason why academic research needs to be carried out at any
cost, devoid of any social and political (small ‘p’) responsibilities.
Academic institutions and museums should, in any case, work more
closely together than they currently seem to. Those who have, have
shown how academic research can help trace the rightful location of a
cultural artefact, whether a painting spoliated during World War II
(1939-45) or ancient funerary objects from an Iraqi museum. This may
be the only case for allowing scholars to work on certain objects of
known or suspected illegal origin. Even humanities academic research these days
requires commitments to certain ethical standards by funding bodies.
If it is not already, I suggest that funding bodies join the cause of
putting an end to the trade in illegally-acquired artefacts by
requiring a commitment from academics to report suspect material to
its holding institution and omit them from their research programmes
altogether.

Tehmina Goskar
Centre for Antiquity and the Middle Ages
University of Southampton

Brass sheet manufactured by Vivian and Sons, Swansea for the Indian market (credit: Vin Callcut, oldcopper.org)

Shortly after the exhibition’s opening I gave a paper at the informal workshop, also organised by the project, on 14-15 July. The workshop title took its name from the project with the aim of bringing research into various aspects of the historic industry up to date. There was particular emphasis on examples of the global impact of the Welsh copper industry, particularly that centred in the Lower Swansea Valley. I hope to make abstracts of the papers available in the research section of the (still in development) Welsh Copper website soon.

Analysis of access to copper heritage on Copper Day

Shaping Perceptions of Copper’s Past

Summary of main themes

Industrial heritage is largely a concern of the built environment comprising monuments and sites. The domination the historic environment sector on the interpretation of and use of industrial cultural landscapes has largely been fuelled by an emphasis on the safeguarding and preservation of physical remains. The re-emergence of industrial landscapes as places of local and regional distinctiveness has also driven the desire to improve the quality and experience of these sites, to both boost cultural tourism and provide local communities with a ‘sense of place’.

This focus on tangible industrial heritage, promoted by international guidelines such as the World Heritage Convention (1972), European Landscape Convention (2000), and their derivatives, has caused certain aspects of an industry or place’s history to be obscured and unconnected. Indeed, in spite of initiatives such as the European Route of Industrial Heritage many sites function as well-conserved islands of passing interest to tourists and local communities with little sense of their original roles as places of interconnected economic and social complexity.

These disjunctures have, in part, been compounded by a lack of publically-circulating, high-quality information on a local industry’s role on national and global stages, causing the subject’s marginalisation in educational curricula and in mainstream publication, and eliciting variable interest from policy-makers and the media. So-called ‘knowledge transfer’ initiatives such as the ESRC-funded Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper Project have sought to redress this imbalance by bringing academically privileged information and specialist research to much wider and larger audiences.

However, in the British context, unlike iron, coal and cotton, copper is an industry without a defining heritage site. Without the constraints of the well-known conserved fabric of a particular landscape this project had relative freedom to set an agenda for communicating the interconnected histories of the global copper industry, while remaining rooted in several of the key locales. The other freedom, which this type of project has afforded, is its relative independence from the institutional agenda of a single organisation.

Although it is too early for a full evaluation of the actual impacts such a project will have on securing a legacy for the heritage of the copper industry, a close quantitative and qualitative analysis of the two major initiatives of the Welsh Copper Project, Copper Day and the exhibition, Byd Copr Cymru-A World of Welsh Copper, shows the extent to which the original intentions for the project have been fulfilled and sets a benchmark for possible future expectations.

This critique of industrial heritage and appraisal of the Welsh Copper Project will form the basis for a major survey of professional and public perceptions of copper’s heritage with a view to publishing the results in Summer 2012.

Traditional dress from Bari, Apulia, 19th century, Museo Civico

I wrote the article based on a paper I gave at the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean conference in Exeter in July 2009. It compares the dress and textile cultures of southern Italy, Fatimid Egypt (through the Genizah document archives) and the heartlands of Greek Byzantium. Several points of similarity and affinity existed between the vestimentary systems of the ‘consuming classes’ of the Mediterranean in the central Middle Ages but there were also notes of difference that are illustrated in some of the comparisons I make. I argue for a more social anthropological approach to be taken with descriptions of dress and textiles and suggest that the Mediterranean does work as an heuristic device for such an exercise. We lose sight of comparisons when we only work within our disciplinary traditions, in this case, ‘western Latin’, ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Islamic’.

The most compelling aspect of working on this subject were the sources themselves. In Apulia in south-eastern Italy, as in the Genizah archives, a number of bridal trousseau lists are comprised in marriage contracts. Yet other parts of Europe and the Mediterranean are not so well documented when it comes to personal and family possessions. Why they were recorded in such detail in the charters and contracts of some regions but not others still remains a mystery. In Amalfi, on the Tyrrhenian cost, the duchy famed for its mercantile prowess, its charters are noticeably mute when it comes to inventories of objects transferred in wills and marriage contracts, or even disputed over. The Genizah documents, of which I did not have first-hand experience, but benefitted largely from the detailed analyses made by Yedida Stillman, record the material worlds of Arab Jews, mostly though not exclusively from Cairo (Fustat). However it has been argued that the dress choices of the Jewish ‘bourgeoisie’ at this time was largely the same as their Muslim counterparts. The evidence from the heartlands of the Byzantine Empire (Greek and Turkey today) is much more patchy, though no less compelling for the comparisons.

I have continued some of the themes raised in this article in another one I have recently written for a special issue of Medieval History Journal on the reception of Islamicate arts in western contexts. My article challenges notions of ‘reception’ and ‘western contexts’ by again adopting a comparative Mediterranean context and urges again for a more empathetic view of the material culture of the past. Let’s look at it, or try and look at (and feel) it from the point of view of the people who used these objects, and reach beyond the dehumanising art historical typologies we are used to discussing objects within.

In Autumn 2008 I reviewed Pieter ter Keurs’s book Condensed Reality. A Study of Material Culture (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2006) for the Journal of Museum Ethnography. Unfortunately due to problems with at the journal’s end the issue which was meant to hold the review has still not appeared. As it is now so long since I wrote the review, and longer since the book was published, I felt it was of benefit to other researchers if I published it here on my website.

This book was a genuinely fascinating read. As I note at the start of the review it is not only of interest to ethnographers and curators with an interest in Papua New Guinea and Indonesia but worthwhile for any scholar of material culture.

Pieter ter Keurs is curator for Indonesian collections at the National Museum of Ethnology (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde) in Leiden, the Netherlands and the book rose out of his doctoral thesis. His case-studies bring together fieldwork conducted in the Siassi Islands of Papua New Guinea in the early 1980s and on the Enggano in 1994.

Download and read Review: Pieter ter Keurs, Condensed Reality. A Study of Material Culture (2006) by Tehmina Goskar.

Copper Day poster, 5 March 2011

Read more about why we thought Copper Day was important.

Read more about Swansea Copper Day and find out what’s going on

Monkey puzzle tree, Chile

On Thursday 16 December at 4pm I shall be giving a paper to this title for the Centre for the Comparative Study of the Americas (CECSAM) at Swansea University.

This will be the first time I have delved into a brand new region’s material culture since my foray into medieval southern Italy for my PhD. My learning curve has been steep and I hope that I do justice to the work of scholars of Latin America on which I will be heavily relying. However, this paper will not be about Wales’ relationship with Latin America during the boom years of the world copper industry in the middle two-thirds of the 19th century, but will rather suggest how this relationship can be interpreted through objects. Through the project I am currently working on, the Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper, I am tasked with doing just this. It isn’t just the Latin American connections that need to be made tangible through the objects and illustrations we will feature in the forthcoming exhibition at the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea in July 2011, but those closer and farther from Wales such as Australia, South Africa, Anglesey and Cornwall. How can this story be told through the things that remain to us? Copper wasn’t the only thing that connected Latin America to Wales. The well-known Monkey-puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana, previously known as Chile Pine in Britain), native to Chile and Argentina, came to the British Isles in the 1850s and a handsome specimen was planted in the estates of Singleton Abbey, previously the home of copper magnates the Vivians, now the core of Swansea University. Did the copper connection bring this particular one to Swansea?

This paper will give me the opportunity to talk about my intellectual approach to choosing objects for exhibitions (and for history writing) and provide a discrete case-study to do this. To be a little out of my comfort zone with a new region’s history will sharpen, I hope, my questions and improve my answers. The title is in homage to copper’s elemental number, 29, and my expectation that 29 key objects can tell the story of the world of Welsh copper.

An enhanced version of my slideshow presentation will now form a part of the 2011 Swansea Latin American Association (Asociación Latinoamericana de Swansea Swansea Latin American Association) festival at the Dylan Thomas Centre where people will be able to learn about the Welsh-Latin American copper connections.

Abstract

World trade in copper was arguably the first fully integrated global industry and Swansea was its powerhouse. From the beginning of the 18th century up until the 1870s about half the world’s mined copper came here to be smelted ready for use in manufactories in the UK and beyond. When sources close to home dried up Welsh prospectors looked to Latin America and Swansea copper barques circled the globe to bring back ore from Valparaiso, Santiago de Cuba, and elsewhere. As part of the ESRC Global and Local Worlds of Welsh Copper Project we aim to bring this history to a much wider audience through events, digitisation and a major exhibition at the National Waterfront Museum in July 2011. This paper will explore how we will represent the industrial and cultural connections between Latin America and Wales through objects.

Thursday 16 December, 16:00

Conference Room (B03), Basement Floor, Callahan Building, Swansea University.

Looking out from the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

In a little under two weeks I shall be starting a new job in the department of History & Classics at the University of Swansea. I will be Research Assistant on an ESRC-funded project entitled, History, heritage, and urban regeneration: the global and local worlds of Welsh copper. Project Leader, Prof Huw Bowen, won the £95,000 funding for this project which will be conducted in partnership with the University of Glamorgan, the National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, and the City and County of Swansea.

Much research of the economic and social impact of the copper industry in Wales has already been conducted, by Prof Bowen and by other academics such as Dr Louise Miskell, also of Swansea, and Prof Chris Evans of Glamorgan. And the classic study of industry in the lower Swansea valley since the industrial revolution is undoubtedly Stephen Hughes’ Copperopolis: Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea (RCAHMW, 2000). All this material, in addition to unpublished, and little known, museum and archive collections will form the basis for this major public impact project to raise awareness of a very much forgotten industry, not only of Wales, but also of the world. By the early nineteenth century, it has been estimated that two-thirds of world copper was coming out of the UK, and of this, up to 90% [export figures are not precisely known] was being processed in the lower Swansea valley, receiving ores first from Cornwall, then from South America and southern Australia for smelting into ingots and rolls ready for export and manufacture elsewhere. Swansea’s strategic position as a major port with a navigable river (Tawe–thus Abertawe) going right into the South Wales coalfields made it the best place for this industry to take place. So the history of Welsh copper is also a world history of copper which makes its appeal far greater than an industrial heritage project that just focuses inwards on producing regions, rather than also reaching outwards to make local and global links further afield.

This rather unsung metal is still used in so many things that its continued demand and promise of profit has caused a recent spate of copper thefts (much like that of lead from church roofs) of telephone wire and the attempted melting down of high-copper content 2p coins. So the history of copper is not just technological or industrial, it has deep social and political implications too: control of resources, exploitation of labour (the transatlatntic slave trade was fueled by world copper commerce too), mass production of goods that changed our consuming habits and desires, its indispensable role in modern electronics and our (over-)reliance on these products. So much of what is past is reflected in what is now, and this is a particular aspect of this project that holds great appeal. The way I view the history of material culture is directly reflected in these past/contemporary comparisons. Our possessions are not just art or necessity, they are of ourselves and that is why understanding material culture is so crucial to the study of history.

My main roles on the project will be to research and select appropriate material for a major exhibition at the National Waterfront Museum in 2011, followed by a travelling exhibition throughout Wales; and to co-ordinate a programme of digitisation of historical resources. There will be several outcomes: online content, including 3-D animations of important industrial sites which are now no more (such as the Hafod Copperworks in Swansea), a public policy forum on heritage and urban regeneration, a one-day academic conference, and the publication of a major study on the development of Welsh copper industry, all of which will provide an important legacy of new heritage and educational materials. The project has already caused a buzz in the media [here you can see a video of Prof Bowen at the copperworks] and I very much hope that I can capitalise on this and continue the momentum by combining high-quality research and interpretation with genuinely creative uses of the arts and social media to get at least some of the incredible knoweldge and information we have on copper and its profound global reach out to academics and the public alike. I want to involve poets and artists, particularly metalworkers, students and other volunteers, family and local historians, as well as academics who work in related fields and can provide a new dimension to the interpretation of what we call industrial history.

If you have any ideas about how this project can be really made to have an impact, please leave a comment below. I will regularly update my site with news of my progress and will shortly be starting up a sketch site of material on copper history that already exists online.