ABSTRACT
The growth of the modern copper industry began in Europe in the late seventeenth century, facilitated by important process innovations. In the late nineteenth century, large-scale production was established in Latin America, the US and Spain, spreading to Africa by 1930. The industry was characterized by a few large partially-integrated mining companies producing on a substantial scale in relation to the size of the market, existing side by side with a large number of smaller undertakings. The postwar years have seen the state-takeover of the copper industry in some of the major producing countries and the recent entrance of the oil corporations. Mining projects are often so large nowadays that they are dominated by joint venture arrangements involving complex webs of financial support and long-term sales agreements.
