ABSTRACT
As Bernard Knapp notes in his introduction to this volume, mining should feature prominently in historical studies because of the central role that metals and fossil fuels have played in the development of industrial societies. Over the past five thousand years literally millions of people have lived, labored (often involuntarily) and died in mining settlements, while the quest for new sources of metals and minerals has been a major motive for exploration, conquest, colonialism and imperialism since at least the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (Shaw, this volume, Chapter 15). Yet the lives of miners have attracted far less attention from social historians, archaeologists and anthropologists in the Englishspeaking countries than have the lives of urban factory workers, fisherfolk or farmers. (There is, however, a substantial literature in German, much of it emanating from the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum in Bochum.) There is certainly much written in English on the technological, economic and business history of mining, but the only aspect of social history that has been researched in real depth is the conflict between capital and labor.
