Aluminum,: Commodity chains, and the environmental history of the second world war

Environmental History

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 69-93

  Evenden, Matthew ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ALLOY; ALUMINUM; COMMODITY; ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE; ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECT; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; LANDSCAPE; MANUFACTURING; MILITARY GOVERNMENT; MINE; MINERAL; WAR;

ASIA; EUROPE;

EID: 79960379879     PISSN: 10845453     EISSN: 19308892     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/envhis/emq145     Document Type: Review

References (92)

1. Siegfried Moos, "The Aluminum Revolution," Bulletin of the Oxford Institute of Statistics, no. 11 (August 8, 1942): 209.
2. Richard P. Tucker and Edmund Russell, eds., Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward an Environmental History of War (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2004).
3. Jennifer Bair, "Global Capitalism and Commodity Chains: Looking Back, Going Forward," Competition & Change 9, no. 2 (June 2005): 152-80
4. Jennifer Bair, "Global Commodity Chains: Genealogy and Review," in Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research, ed. Jennifer Baird (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1-34.
5. Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, "Commodity chains in the world economy prior to 1800," Review 10, no. 1 (1986): 157-70.
6. This paper was republished as Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, "Commodity chains in the world economy prior to 1800," in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), 221-33.
7. Bair, "Global Capitalism"
8. Jeffrey Henderson, Peter Dicken, Martin Hess, Neil Coe, and Henry Wai-Chung Yeung, "Global Production Networks and the Analysis of Economic Development," Review of International Political Economy 9, no. 3 (2002): 436-64
9. Deborah Leslie and Suzanne Reimer, "Spatializing Commodity Chains," Progress in Human Geography 23, no. 3 (1999): 401-20 (Pubitemid 29477931)
10. on food, see in particular Ian Cook, "Follow of the Thing: Papaya," Antipode 36, no. 4 (2004): 642-64.
11. A. Arce and T. K. Marsden, "The Social Construction of International Food: A New Research Agenda," Economic Geography 69, no. 3 (1993): 293-311. (Pubitemid 24388046)
12. On spatial issues, see Leslie and Reimer, "Spatializing Commodity Chains."
13. Some arguments for an ecological perspective have been raised by Wilma A. Dunaway, "Women's Labor and Nature: The Twenty-first Century World System from a Radical Ecofeminist Perspective," in Emerging Issues in the 21st Century World-System: New Theoretical Directions for the 21st Century World-System, ed. Wilma A. Dunaway (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2003), 183-202
14. Jason W. Moore, "Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization," Review 23, no. 3 (2000): 409-33
15. Amy A. Quark, "Toward a New Theory of Change: Socio-Natural Regimes and the Historical Development of the Textiles Commodity Chain," Review 31, no. 1 (2008): 1-37. Quote is from p. 7.
16. See also Alf Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and Joan Martinez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change (Lanham: Altamira Press, 2007).
17. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the GreatWest (New York: Norton, 1992)
18. Richard Hoffmann, "Frontier Foods for Late Medieval Consumers," Environment and History 7 (2001): 131-67
19. Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: the United States and the Ecological Destruction of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
20. Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: the History and Ecology of the Henequin-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950 (College Station: Texas A & M Press, 2007)
21. John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).
22. See for example the use of the concept to explore aspects of political economy over the long term in Latin America in Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
23. Paul A. C. Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940-1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 136.
24. David Massell, Amassing Power: J. B. Duke and the Saguenay River, 1897-1927 (Montréal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2000).
25. Duncan C. Campbell, Global Mission: The Story of Alcan (Montréal: Alcan, 1985), 251.
26. Nigel Balchin, The Aircraft Builders: An Account of British Aircraft Production, 1935-1945 (London: His Majesty's Stationary Office, 1947), 53.
27. League of Nations, Geneva, World Economic Survey, 1942/44 (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 73.
28. UK National Archives, documents online, Catalogue Reference cab/67/6/3, War Cabinet, "The Economic Consequences to the Allies and to Germany respectively of the Seizure by Germany of Denmark and Norway," Statement by Lord Stamp's Survey of Economic and Financial Plans, April 13, 1940.
29. H. Duncan Hall, North American Supply (London: HM Stationary Office, 1955), 367.
30. Paul A. C. Koistinen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1940-1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 136
31. Gerald D. Nash, World War II and the West: Reshaping the Economy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 91-121
32. George David Smith, From Monopoly to Competition: The Transformation of Alcoa, 1888-1986 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 191-249.
33. David Massell, "'As Though There Was No Boundary': The Shipshaw Project and Continental Integration," American Review of Canadian Studies (Summer 2004): 187-222. (Pubitemid 39412072)
34. J. L. Granatstein, Canada's War: The Politics of the Mackenzie King Government, 1939-1945 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1979), 143. On the importance of Canadian-American links around aluminum and electricity during the war
35. see David Massell, "'As Though There Was No Boundary.'"
36. Carlo Lamur, The American Takeover: Industrial Emergence and Alcoa's Expansion in Guyana and Suriname, 1914-1921 (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1985).
37. Bradford Barham, "Strategic Capacity Investments and the Alcoa-Alcan Monopoly, 1888-1945," in States, Firms, and Raw Materials: The World Economy and Ecology of Aluminum, ed. Bradford Barham, Stephen G. Bunker, and Denis O'Hearn (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 87, 101.
38. Campbell, Global Mission, 319.
39. For a nostalgic and interesting account of Mackenzie in the prewar and wartime period, see Patricia Wendy Dathan, Bauxite, Sugar and Mud: Memories of Living in Colonial Guyana, 1928-1944 (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, PQ: Shoreline, 2006)
40. see also Campbell, Global Mission, 313-14. Although Campbell's is the official history of Alcan, it nevertheless acknowledges the racial and colonial politics of the settlement.
41. Campbell, Global Mission, 295-97.
42. Jose Iguartua, "Les origines des travailleurs de l'Alcan au Saguenay, 1925-1939," Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française 37, no. 2 (1983): 291-308. The second largest group of workers were Eastern European immigrants, notably Finns and Czechs.
43. José Iguartua, Arvida au Saguenay: Naissance d'une ville industrielle (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press, 1996).
44. Matthew Evenden, "La mobilisation des rivières et des fleuves pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Québec et l'hydroé lectricité, 1939-1945," Revue d'histoire de l'Amerique Française 60, no. 1-2 (2006): 125-62.
45. Don Whitington, "Canada is Aluminum Nerve Center," Canberra Times, August 7, 1944.
46. Two major interties linked the three systems: the first, a 220,000-voltage transmission line, completed in November 1940, ran between Trois-Rivières and Québec City, linking Alcan's Saguenay system with those of the Shawinigan system
47. the second, a 120,000-voltage line, completed a year later, ran under the island of Montréal, connecting the Montréal and Shawinigan systems.
48. See D. M. Farnham and O. W. Titus, "Design, Manufacture, and Installation of 120-Kv Oil-Filled Cables in Canada," Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 61 (December 1942): 881-88.
49. Matthew Evenden, "La mobilisation des rivières et des fleuves pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale: Québec et l'hydroé lectricité, 1939-1945," Revue d'histoire de l'Amerique Française (2006) 60, no. 1-2: 125-62.
50. U.S. National Archives, RG 179, Stack area 570, row 65, compartment 10, shelf 05, entry 162, Box 1, File: Joint Economic Committee Memoranda, 1941, Memo 12, July 29, 1941, "Restriction of Newsprint Paper Production"
51. "Canada Begins Stricter Curb on Newsprint," Christian Science Monitor September 3, 1942. The wartime power conservation order is contained in Library and Archives of Canada (LAC), RG 28, vol. 251, file 196-11-2, Department of Munitions and Supply, the Power Controller, Order No. P.C. 5 (Power Shortage Areas), Dated at Montréal, September 20, 1942. On wartime power conservation
52. see Matthew Evenden, "Lights Out: Conserving Electricity for War in the Canadian City, 1939-1945," Urban History Review 34 (1) (2005): 88-99. (Pubitemid 41656334)
53. W. R. Way, "Québec Rivers Unite for Victory: Notes sur l'interconexion des réseaux électriques du Québec," Shawinigan Journal 1, no. 5 (May 1944): 8-12
54. "Power-System Interconnection in Québec," Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers 61 (December 1942): 841-47.
55. LAC, RG 2, 7C, vol. 3 [reel C-11789], Minutes of the War Committee of Cabinet, March 12, 1941
56. Documents of the Cabinet War Committee, Memorandum, March 3, 1941, from Chiefs of Staff Committee to Ministers re aluminum plant at Arvida
57. Extracts of Minutes of Defence Council Meeting of March 7, 1941, vol. 4, Minutes of the War Committee of Cabinet, April 21, 1941, May 21, 1941. The British position held that the likelihood of attack was remote: British Parliamentary Archives, Beaverbrook Papers, BBK/D/109, "B.A. 330 TAUT 397," n.d. On security and sabotage fears
58. see John MacFarlane, "Agents of Control or Chaos? A Strike at Arvida Helps Clarify Canadian Policy on Using Troops against Workers during the Second World War," Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2005): 619-40.
59. The Alcan works manager, Alexander Charles Johnston, noted before the Royal Commission charged with investigating the circumstances of the 1941 strike that there would be only about ten men on armed patrols at any given time but that there was also a home guard contingent with antiaircraft guns on site: LAC, RG 33, series 56, vols. 1-3, Fonds de la Commission royale chargé d'enquêter sur les événements qui se sont produits a Àrvida, PQ en julliet 1941, 49.
60. Fitzroy Andre Baptise, War, Cooperation, and Conflict: The European Possessions in the Caribbean, 1939-1945 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 87.
61. On the politics behind this decision, see Daryl F. White, "Multinational Patriots: Business- Government Relations in the Canadian Nickel and Aluminum Industries, 1914-1945," PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2006, 274.
62. Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
63. Jay R. Mandle, The Plantation Economy: Population and Economic Change in Guyana, 1838-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 113.
64. Paul Clark's estimate cited in Campbell, Global Mission, 299.
65. Quoted in Baptiste, War, Cooperation, and Conflict, 143.
66. Duncan Campbell has produced the most complete picture available of Alcan's wartime shipping problem. See Global Mission, 295-303.
67. Campbell, Global Mission, 329-35.
68. Imperial Institute, The Mineral Industry of the British Empire and Foreign Countries, Statistical Summary, 1938-1944 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1945), 10.
69. David Massell, "Power and the Peribonka, a Prehistory: 1900-1930s," Quebec Studies 38 (2004-05): 87-103
70. Quebec Hydropolitics: The Peribonka Concessions of the Second World War (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press, 2011).
71. Archives Hydro-Québec (AHQ), Fonds Shawinigan Water and Power Company, Box 4106, F1/1296, B. W. Taylor, second report on the fish in the St. Maurice watershed
72. F1/1297 Arthur Surveyer, "Report on La Croche River Investigation," 1945
73. AHQ, Fonds Beauharnois Light, Heat and Power Company, box 3553, F2/2215/2, "Groundwater Investigations in the Vicinity of Beauharnois Canal," Beauharnois, PQ, January 14, 1942
74. box 4195, F2/22152, Professor Marie-Victorin, University of Montréal, "Report on a Physiological and Ecological Reconnaissance along the Shores of the St. Lawrence River between Lake St. Louis and Lake St. Francis (August-December 1940)," 3 vols.
75. John N. Smith and Eric M. Levy, "Geochronology for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon contamination in sediments of the Saguenay Fjord," Environmental Science and Technology 24, no. 6 (1990): 874-79 (Pubitemid 20378054)
76. "Contamination," Saguenay Fjord Virtual Museum, Virtual Museum of Canada. http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/ Fjord/english/e-hydro-e. html.
77. Daniel Martineau, Karin Lemberger, André Dallaire, Philippe Labelle, Thomas P. Lipscomb, Pascal Michel, and Igor Mikaelian, "Cancer in Wildlife, a Case Study: Beluga from the St. Lawrence Estuary, Québec, Canada," Environmental Health Perspectives 110, no. 3 (2002): 285-92. (Pubitemid 34257195)
78. Denis O'Hearn, "Producing Imperialism Anew: The United States, the United Kingdom, and Jamaican Bauxite," in States, Firms and Raw Materials: The World Economy and Ecology of Aluminum, ed. Bradford Barham, Stephen G. Bunker, and Denis O'Hearn, 154-55.
79. Matthew Evenden, "Mobilizing Rivers: Hydro-Electricity, the State and World War II in Canada," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99 (December 2009): 940-47.
80. Rapport Général du Ministre de la Chasse et des Pêcheries (Québec, 1944), 13.
81. Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification inWestern Society, 1880-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
82. Brian Finnimore, "The A.I.R.O.H House: Industrial Diversification and State Building Policy," Construction History 1 (1985): 60-71
83. Dennis Doordan, "Promoting Aluminum: Designers and the American Aluminum Industry," Design Issues 9, no. 2 (1993): 44-50.
84. I am grateful to Judy Bennett for sending me a copy of this photograph when she read and commented on an early draft of the paper for the World Congress of Environmental History meetings. She came across it in the course of researching Natives and Exotics: World War II and Environment in the Southern Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), which has much to say about the environmental legacies of war and all the planes and material left behind.
85. Jason W. Moore, "The Modern World-System as Environmental History? Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism," Theory and Society 32 (2003): 307-77. (Pubitemid 36796458)
86. Hopkins andWallerstein, "Commodity Chains in theWorld-Economy prior to 1800," 233.
87. One attempt to grapple with the effects of the First World War from a world-systems perspective is Kosmas Tsokhas, "War, Industrialization, and State Intervention in the Semiperiphery: The Australian Case," Review 19, no. 2 (1996): 197-223.
88. Moore, "Sugar and the Expansion of the Early ModernWorld Economy." Moore notes the importance of warfare in triggering forest fires (421) but suggests that the link between interimperial and military conflict and ecological change is understudied in the period-a fair point that has changed recently. Nevertheless, there is a rich and longstanding literature on war and imperialism in the Caribbean realm that could quite independently enrich an analysis of commodity frontiers.
89. In the case of the sugar commodity frontier, for example, see Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: the British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
90. John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 104.
91. Moore, "The Modern World-System as Environmental History?" 4.
92. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, "The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History: A Re-reading of the Field," Environmental History 12, no. 1 (2007): 107-30. (Pubitemid 46437698)