Due to large scale electrification, demand for copper rose exponentially at the end of the 19th century. New copper resources were found across the world, particularly South America and Africa. In these areas, companies transformed and integrated new sources of resources, the so called resource frontiers, in the world economy, however, mostly under very difficult circumstances. The central argument of the project is that historical research hitherto fails to capture the local and global complexity of business investments in such frontiers and has taken the provision of natural resources as a given. Often in remote areas or without much prior infrastructure and organisation, natural resource companies needed to deal with a wide variety of local challenges. It was required to organise the access to land, labour and resources (food & energy) whereas these firms usually had to work under hostile environmental and social conditions. Next to these local challenges, companies faced a variety of global challenges. Companies did not simply follow expansion of empire, and depended heavily upon networks with other private actors. In order to capture the variety of local and global challenges, the project
focuses on the activities of three copper companies, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga, Rhodesian Selection Trust and the Chile Exploration Company and how they incorporated new copper frontiers in the world economy.