Peter,
First of all, sorry for the delay. I had to take a look to my library
before finding an answer to your questions.
The information about Rio Tinto in English is quite abundant:
AVERY, D. (1974), Not on Queen Victoria's birthday: The story of the Rio
Tinto mines, Colins.
Harvey, Ch. (1981), The Rio tinto Company: An Economic History of a Leading
International MIning Concern, Perzance.
I am sure you can get information about the number of workers employed by
Rio Tinto in these books, especially in the second one.
If you can read Spanish, I can give some more references. In one of them I
have found a graph -unfortunatelly not a table- from which you roughly can
estimate the employment in Rio Tinto figures: some 12.000 workers circa
1880; around 17.000 circa 1910 and less than 8.000 in 1936. Concerning its
size as an employer, by 1906, only Calumet and Hecla, in the USA, and Ashio
(belonging to Furukawa Mining Co.) could compare with Rio Tinto. If you
need more details -or the complete series- do not hesitate to ask, I will
try to do my best...Do the same if you need anything connected with Spanish
mining of the period or before.
Is there anything like an historical and geographical atlas of the UK
mining regions?
Thanks once again for your cooperation
Rafa.
Ps. I am trying to discuss a very popular idea among Spanish scholars,
according to which mining activities in Spain during the boom (1870-1914)
did not promote too much structural change and growth -Bask Country apart-
because of the foreign nationality of major companies envolved in mining.
Foreign nationality plus liberal economic policy implied a low retained
value by Spanish regions. The implicit assumption under this reasoning is
that mining is necessarily associated with structural change and growth. To
me that assumption is wrong at an international scale: for a number of
reasons, not all mining regions share the conditions (location,
institutions, human capital, etc.) required by a successful
industrialization no matter the nationality of firms operating in the
regions. Taking into account the British experience -or others if you know
of- would you agree with me?
|