Interior's Proper Place: response to Tyler Priest

Abstract

Tyler Priest has written extensively and convincingly on the history of global mineral flows and offshore oil operations. He has recently turned attention to my book, The Global Interior. In his review, Priest maintains that I greatly exaggerate the importance of the Interior Department to global mineral extraction, pointing to matters of proportion and evidence. Regarding the former, Priest brings attention to the multitude of operators involved in unearthing minerals, including those operators who do the most mining around the world. However, my thesis is not and never was that the Interior Department was the most important entity unearthing minerals around the world. I did and do uphold the importance of the department’s role in creating conditions favourable to mining across a vast array of thresholds, including Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans and outer space. Attention to such activities helps unravel the myth of US exceptionalism through its foundational contradictions: the department overtly declared a narrow profile yet aided in the projection of US power in ‘exterior’ places (p. 4) – a story he concedes ‘may be worth telling’. While I ask a fundamentally different set of questions than those raised by Priest in his review, I am happy to clarify my thinking within the parameters he sets regarding mineral flows. Our specific vantage point on power is what is centrally at stake in the disagreement. Priest sees my attention to figures from the Interior Department as misguided. The problem for him is one of proportion. For Priest, their role was marginal. The real procurement story centred around more important players: businessmen, financial intermediaries and firms. Their importance resides in the money they marshalled, whether by government allocation or financial will, and in a status of ‘shaping policy’ through powerful institutions, including resource advisory boards, the military and the State Department. Priest’s own work on the important Brazilian steel industry examines such features of the machinery of procurement. Through much of his review, he drills down into the case of Brazilian manganese, crucially important in the Second World War. Taking other core samples featured in my book, including iron in Liberia, we see Interior players with important, even catalytic roles. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lansdell K. Christie, a New York businessman and an ‘old friend’ of Liberian president William Tubman, helped the third largest steel company in the United States, Republic Steel, acquire a Liberian iron mining concession that yielded 1,250,000 tons of ore annually by 1953. What guided Christie to the region was a report by Thomas P. Thayer, a member of the Interior Department’s US Geological Survey. An