Diversification as a Response to Decline in the Mining Industry: Arsenic and South-Western Metal Production 1850

Abstract

Joint supply functions are not uncommon but nowhere are they more prevalent than in the mining industry. Assessment of the importance of marketable by-products is made more difficult by the lack of detailed information on costs. This study shows how data on output and prices may be used to provide evidence of the qualitative and quantitative importance of arsenic—the most important by-product of S.W. mines—to the development and performance of the S.W. mining industry. Detailed annual returns on tin and copper mines are used to chart the development of individual mines. The circumstantial evidence for the importance of arsenic is strong but the use of highly disaggregated data reveals that arsenic production was irrelevant to the vast majority of tin and copper producers although for a few it may have aided continuity of production for a very short period. The apparent misconceptions are shown to have arisen from the development of one major arsenic producer. Statistical evidence is produced in the form of estimated supply functions. The functions are well defined and reveal that neither the price of nor production levels of arsenic had any significant impact on tin and copper production—a result in marked contrast to the casual empiricism of industrial historians.

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References

See Barton

D. B.

“Arsenic Production in West Cornwall” in Essays in Cornish Mining History, 2, (Truro, 1971) 101–125.

Earl

Cornish Mining (Truro, 1968) 22.

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D. B.

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Richardson

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(1974). Metal Mining, 161.

Morrison

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Cornwall’s Central Mines: The Northern District 1810–1895 (Penzance, 1980) p. 7, and Buckley

J. A.

, A History of South Crofty Mine, (Redruth, 1982), 89.

Three or four mines continued to make a tenuous living until recently—South Crofty, Geevor, Wheal Jane and Pendarves—but they hardly comprised an “industry”.

See Morrison

T. A.

Cornwall’s Central Mines, 20, 190–191.

For a brief resume of the history of this mine see Goodridge

J. C.

, “Devon Great Consols: A study in Victorian Mining Enterprise”, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 96(1964), 228–268. It is of interest that the directors of Devon Great Consols were never happy with their dependence on arsenic and through the 1870s and 1880s reinvested a large part of their income in exploration at depth in the hope that they might emulate the success of Dolcoath in passing through the upper horizon and find tin at lower levels in the same loads.

While IV and similar estimation techniques are consistent, there is no guarantee that they are unbiased in small samples. In general, it is believed that OLS results are more robust, hence presentation of both.

10.

See the comments above p. 12. Also see Burke

Richardson

“The decline and fall of the cost book system in the Cornish tin mining industry 1895–1914” and Burt

Kudo

, “The adaptability of the Cornish cost book system” Business History XXIII No. 1 (1981) 4–18 & XXV No. 1 (1983) 30–41.

11.

See Minchinton

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The British Tinplate Industry: A History (Oxford 1957); Mitchell

B. R.

Deane

, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge 1962); US Dept of Commerce: Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (1961).

12.

The main source of data for this article were the annual returns of mine production appearing in The Mineral Statistics of the United Kingdom 1854 to 1913. These were published by the Mining Record Office of the Geological Survey and Museum down to 1881 and thereafter by Her Majesty’s Inspector of Mines. This material is now stored in a computer archive at the University of Exeter and has been published in Burt

Waite

Burnley

, Devon and Somerset Mines and Cornish Mines (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1985 & 1987).

13.

See Flinn

M. W.

Stoker

The History of the British Coal Industry Vol. 2 1700 and 1830 The Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1984).

Diversification as a Response to Decline in the Mining Industry: Arsenic and South-Western Metal Production 1850–1914

Abstract

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References