Gold Rushes, Universities and Globalization, 1840–1910

Abstract

This article examines a set of public universities that opened after 1848 across California, Australasia, South Africa and Canada. It argues that these institutions, termed the ‘goldfield foundations’, owed the speed of their formation, if not their existence, to the period’s global gold and mineral rushes. During the first capital-intensive years of university development, new mineral wealth added liquidity to colonial finance and enriched the main sources of university income. At the same time, the social upheaval caused by gold rushes stimulated regionalism and drives to re-establish Old World hierarchies in ways that made university building attractive. Exploring these institutions’ interconnected development has important implications for the study of empire, extractive capitalism and globalization. The relationship between higher education and mineral extraction in the nineteenth century was co-constitutive. Goldfield universities’ rapid growth depended upon the imperial and global circuits of ideas, people and capital that flowed from the rushes. Yet, once opened, these universities became tremendous drivers of globalization themselves, producing techniques of extraction, expertise and technologies that propelled the global mining industry and prolonged the mineral rushes that had first established them.