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King Copper / South Wales and the Copper Trade 1584 - 1895 by Ronald Rees, May 2000. 179 pp 22 photos / illus. University of Wales Press. SB £14.99 HB £30.00 There are numerous papers, pamphlets, theses etc on the Swansea copper trade but this is only the second book to be published on this topic in the last hundred years, the first being Grant-Francis, The Development of Copper Smelting in the Swansea District 1881. The author of this latest work, was, until his retirement, Professor of Geography at the University of Saskatchewan. Clearly an expert in this field he writes with verve and style and has produced a work of rigorous scholarship. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a belt of coastal smelters used locally produced coal and copper ores from, Cornwall, Anglesey, Cuba and Chile to produce virtually all of Britain’s copper and indeed that of much of the world. Copper brought amazing wealth and prosperity to Swansea, and fortunes were made the remnants of which can still be seen today in the estates of the industrialists. However, this prosperity came at a price and led to conditions which would never be tolerated today. The smelting process produced not only mountains of slag but the smelters disgorged billowing clouds of toxic, foul-smelling smoke, laced with sulphur and arsenic. The pollution led to the death of crops and grazing animals and although farmers and landowners sought compensation from the copper companies, their appeals failed. The consequence was a series of dramatic `smoke’ trials that set industry against country, but such was the contribution of copper to the economy that questions about public health and the loss of attractive landscapes came a poor second best. Eventually the prohibitive costs of shipping the concentrates shifted the balance of advantages from siting the smelters near the coalfields to locating them at the ore fields and in 1906 Rio Tinto moved its smelting operations to Spain. Today copper is mined and smelted at remote mountain and desert locations like, Sudbury, Ontario and Flin Flon, Manitoba. The pollution is still there, and environmentalists may deplore the wastelands of bare and blackened rock, but there are no farmers and landowners to complain. TO _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.