Arctic network builders : the Arctic Coal Company's operations on Spitsbergen and its relationship with the environment

In 1906, two American industrialists, John Munroe Longyear and Frederick Ayer, formed the Arctic Coal Company to make the first large scale attempt at mining in the high-Arctic location of Spitsbergen, north of the Norwegian mainland. In doing so, they encountered numerous obstacles and built an organization that attempted to overcome them. The Americans sold out in 1916 but others followed, eventually culminating in the transformation of a largely underdeveloped landscape into a mining region. This work uses John Law’s network approach of the Actor Network Theory (ANT) framework to explain how the Arctic Coal Company built a mining network in this environmentally difficult region and why they made the choices they did. It does so by identifying and analyzing the problems the company encountered and the strategies they used to overcome them by focusing on three major components of the operations; the company’s four land claims, its technical system and its main settlement, Longyear City. Extensive comparison between aspects of Longyear City and the company’s choices of technology with other American examples place analysis of the company in a wider context and helps isolate unique aspects of mining in the high-Arctic. American examples dominate comparative sections because Americans dominated the ownership and upper management of the company.

Company Houses Along the Picket Line

Michigan copper mining companies owned and rented more than 3,000 houses along the Keweenaw Peninsula at the time of the 1913-14 copper strike. The provision of company-constructed housing in mining districts has drawn a wide range of inquiry. Mining historians, community planners, architectural historians, and academics interested in the immigrant experience have identified miners' housing as intriguing examples of corporate paternalism, social planning, vernacular adaptation and ethnic segregation. Michigan's Copper Country retains many examples of such housing and recent research has shown that the Michigan copper mining companies championed the use of housing as a non-wage employment benefit. This paper will investigate the increasingly important role of occupancy and control of company housing during the strike. Illustrated with images collected during the strike by the fledgling U.S. Department of Labor, the presentation explores the history of company housing in the Copper Country, its part in a larger system of corporate welfare, and how the threat of evictions may have turned the tide of strike.