The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush

摘要

David Igler's first book, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (2001), tracked the business careers of Henry Miller and Charles Lux, German wholesale butchers who arrived in San Francisco in 1850. Together they created Miller & Lux, a vertically integrated conglomerate with market power in beef production and meatpacking, through the acquisition of over a million acres of land and securing water rights to irrigate it for fodder production. The case study showed how post-gold rush capitalists, often working within partnerships and corporations, ploughed back their capital gains and mining dividends through further investment in natural resource extraction, commercial and transport infrastructure, and by diversifying into rural land ownership. In the process, they transformed the landscape and its waterways, dispossessed smaller landowners, and established ethnically segmented labour forces.