Capital Mediators: American Mining Engineers in the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, 1850-1914

This dissertation analyzes the technical work and social milieu of American mining engineers to understand the daily negotiations by which private U.S. capital reached up to and across the southwestern border as part of an ongoing project of American territorial and economic expansion. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American mining engineers traveled all over the world as expert consultants and labor managers. The business negotiations, elite social networks, and gendered discourse of expertise\u27 invoked by these technocratic professionals were critical influences in bringing the hard-rock mining districts of North America into the economic system of the United States. By integrating the history of technical experts into the history of the transnational mining industry, my research contributes to an understanding of the process by which American economic hegemony was established in a border region peripheral to the federal governments of both Washington, D.C. and Mexico City