Department of Management seminar Spirits of Extraction - With Professor Claire Benclowe

In the eighteenth century, Cornish miners were described by their neighbours as ‘a separate race of humans' — savage, ungovernable, blackened by their proximity to the earth. By the early twentieth century, the descendants of those same miners, scattered across the mining frontiers of Australia, South Africa, and the Americas, were marching under union banners demanding exclusive rights for white workers. This talk traces that transformation, examining what it tells us about the entanglement of labour, race, and evangelical Christianity in the making of global extractive capitalism.

Drawing on my book Spirits of Extraction, I argue that Cornish miners and their Methodist faith were not peripheral to the history of racial capitalism — they were one of its generative sites. Methodism did not simply console miners for the hardships of industrial labour. It helped to construct a spiritual and moral framework through which mining itself came to be experienced as a quasi-sacred force: an evangelical movement from darkness into light, from primitive depths to civilised surfaces. That framework, I argue, did crucial ideological work. It eased the passage of working-class Cornish migrants into positions of racial privilege in settler colonial mining towns, enabling what Jonathan Hyslop has called ‘White Labourism' — the demand, embedded in early trade unionism, that whiteness confer exclusive entitlement to skilled work. It also aided the enduring fusion of settler state sovereignty with the fortunes of extractive industry. Grounding Kathryn Yusoff's concept ‘geology of race' in sociological story the talk attends to the specific forms of work organisation, diasporic solidarity, and labour market exclusion through which the ‘myth of the Cousin Jack' — the Cornish miner as innately superior miners — congealed into a racialised industrial identity with lasting consequences for labour politics across the British Empire and beyond.