Jack Goody - Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An Essay on the Origins of the Modern World

Mining is a highly dangerous occupation, involving its workers spending many hours underground in inhumane conditions, subject to falls of tunnels and to the invasion of gas or of water. It is work that free men rarely wanted to do and so the Pharaohs found slaves and convicts to go there. In later times, men were forced to do this, either for money or also because they had no land, no other job. Mining has virtually disappeared in Britain (and Europe) during my lifetime and the search for metals has been largely transferred to developing countries, just as in the early days Europe was the continent to be plundered, and developed in the process. This book, which is an account of that search, is humbly dedicated to these miners, who formed their own community, as the work of Clancy Segal and of Slaughter and Henriques has brought out. While my own trajectory led me to a different, and more comfortable, existence, my life has been much influenced by the Hunger Marches of the miners of my youth, by my serving in a regiment of Nottinghamshire miners in the war, by friends as Bevin Boys on my return, by the work of the Tavistock Institute in the coalfields after the war, of the political activity of workers in the Fife coalfields, and by the attempts of Arthur Scargill and others to fight to keep the industry in this country.

This work was written because various scholars from abroad (including those at the Muslim College) had asked me to contribute a lecture for them and for CRASSH, the Centre for Arts and Humanities at Cambridge, so they could link their European studies with their homes in the east; but in the end I gave something different and got down to writing the book.

So it is about the development of society in Europe and the Near East from the Bronze Age on, when the urban civilisations had little or no metal and therefore had to search among other peoples and in other places. And so the situation remained in the Near East. But the fact that the book is largely about metals should not make us forget the other aspects of urban civilisation, the spread of literacy and of written religions. All these are linked together and it is a mistake completely to separate off the two spheres, as so many do, both scientists and humanists. Given the frequent use in the humanities of the dichotomy between sciences (and technology) and the arts (and communication), I must stress that I am not seeking to exclude one or the other (nor yet the religious or the secular) but to trace the connections in a rounded (anthropological) view.

I have not given as much attention to China and the east, nor yet to the Americas, as I should have done, but my reason is that I began with the question of Europe and the Near East and that remains very much the focus. The former did develop an Age of Metals, possibly stimulated by the Near East but with a different history until recently. In Meso-America similarities existed at the level of urbanisation but metallurgy as distinct from metal-working (in gold) was little advanced before the coming of Europeans.

I am aware that arguments have gone on about the diffusionist approach; in an essay Wengrow writes of the collapse of diffusionism and offers an interactionist approach instead. Rather than drawing a line between civilised (Bronze Age) and barbarian, he himself prefers interactionism and would rather make a distinction between archival and sacrificial economies, the first associated with a complex administration, the second not. I can see some tendencies to different uses that can be so described but nothing like a dualism. One does not exclude the other. In looking at metals, we have almost certainly to take a modified diffusionist approach, which is not the answer to every question and certainly does not exclude local invention. In the Early Bronze Age cultures, we find sacrificial hearths although the use of metals was present in warfare and in peace; there is nothing contradictory here.