Sebastião Salgado -- Full view of the Serra Pelada gold mine
Brazil, 1986

For more mining visuals, movie Powaqqatsi: Francis Ford Coppla and George Lucas.

Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin, 1999

The close association of mining with warfare is ancient. To insure that growth, the rulers of cities needed the metals to make both weapons and currency. Metals requires mines (metalla in Latin), which in turn need cheap and expendable labor to work them. Mines likewise demand forests to smelt the ores, power the machinery, and prop the tunnels. Those requirements alone spell expansion. Rome's citizens would have appreciated the wisdom so tersely embodied in San Francisco's motto, Gold in Peace, Iron in War. Yet truth is somewhat more complex, for gold has long served as one of the chief stimulants and objectives of war. Large-scale mining therefore requires not only military order for the miners but the military itself to assure continued production. Mining tools can easily be turned to weapons, and desperation to rebellion.

As mining has long been associated with war, so too does its workforce require military organization and oversight. At Rio Tinto, a long-distance chain of command emanated from those who enjoyed the fruits of the mines in Rome, through managers, soldiers, and engineers down to an army of as many as forty thousand slaves at the mine head. As long as strict order was maintained and the profits continued to flow back to the city, Rio Tinto served as the greatest mining school of the ancient world. Engineers trained there took their expertise to all parts of the Roman Empire, just as their successors would take what they had learned in California to the remotest corners of the earth.

The miner's lot has been more difficult to romanticize, for throughout most of history, mining has meant punishment. Few men, women, or children went willingly into the pits or the refineries, venues traditionally reserved for slaves, convicts, and prisoners of war. To be condemned to the mines was, for the Romans, a fate comparable to the the arena. it guaranteed the condemned to a short and brutish life. Poverty remained the lot of most miners even when freed from serfdom in the Middle Ages, for rarely are mining's returns democratic. The industry typically concentrates wealth in the hands of a few at the lasting expense of the regions and people that produce it.

Mines are usually located in mountainous regions far from the cities they enrich and the estates they create. Their remoteness permits city dwellers to remain ignorant of those workers long known simply as "hill men." The distinction is seldom lost on the miners themselves, who watch the "sums defying belief" leave their towns to enrich those living in distant cities. Throughout history, "hill men" have risen in strikes and revolt against their masters, wrecking the source of wealth itself and directly or indirectly threatening the cities to which that wealth flows.

History of the Precious Metals by Alexander Del Mar, 1902

In B.C. 50 the Bisharee mines were visited by Diodorus Siculus. He says: "On the confines of Egypt and the neighboring countries there are regions full of gold mines, whence, with the cost and pains of many labourers, much gold is dug. For the kings of Egypt condemn to these mines not only notorious criminals, captives taken in war, persons accused of false dealings, and those with whom the king is offended, but also all the kindred and relatives of the convicts. These are sent to this work, either as a punishment, or that the profit and gain of the king may be increased by their labour.

"There are thus infinite numbers thrown into these mines, all bound in fetters, kept at work night and day, and so strictly surrounded that there is no possibility of the effecting an escape. They are guarded by mercenary soldiers of various barbarous nations, whose language is foreign to them and to each other, so that there are no means of forming conspiracies or of corrupting those who are set to watch them. They are kept to incessant work by the rod of the overseer, who often lashes them severely. Not the least care is taken of the bodies of these poor creatures; they have not a rag to cover their nakedness; and whoever sees them must compassionate their melancholy and deplorable condition, for though they may be sick, maimed or lame, no rest nor any intermission of labour is allowed them. Neither the weakness of old age, not the infirmities of females, excuse any from the work, to which all are driven by blows and cudgels; until borne down by the intolerable weight of their misery, many fall dead in the midst of their insufferable labours. Deprived of all hope, these miserable creatures expect each day to be worse that the last, and long for death to end their sufferings."

The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World by Stefan Kanfer, 1993

The Black Miners: Pre-WWI

Native life represented the squalor. For black men to take a freight train from their villages to Johannesburg was like entering some dreadful time machine. They stepped aboard in the tenth century, with its intense village life and age-old rites. They exited into the twentieth-century city of technology and segregation. At night the gold miners lived in all-male compounds; during the day they tunneled deep into the earth, a dark, hazardous place of explosions and cave-ins. No matter what their ages, they were addressed as "boys", and mine owners made sure that they never matured into adult citizens. There would be no more bargaining for higher wages or better conditions. Natives were forbidden to go on strike, to hold office, to become managers of any kind. Schools, poor in every sense, served as little more than holding stations. In early adolescence children were expected to leave the classroom in order to refill the reservoir of cheap labor. Every native knew that he could be replaced overnight; hundreds of unemployed black men clamored for his job. The oversupply of native labor affected every aspect of Johannesburg life. No matter how underpaid, how menial the position, candidates were pathetically eager to take it.

Spartacus by Howard Fast

They have been crawling in the shafts, and now when they come out, they still crawl like animals. They have not bathed since they are here, nor will they ever bathe again. Their skins are patchworks of black dust and brown dirt; their hair is long and tangled, and when they are not children, they are bearded. Some are black men and some are white men, but the difference now is so little that one hardly remarks upon it. They all have ugly calluses on knees and elbows, and they are naked, completely naked. Why not? Will clothes keep them alive longer? The mine has only one purpose, to bring profits to the Roman stockholders, and even shreds of dirty cloth cost something.