Duncan Money

The airport itself is modelled after an emerald, as there is an emerald mine nearby (thanks to Zenge on Twitter for pointing this out).

Large advert billboard on a wall. The advert shows a map of the world with the slogan "Thanks to Minerals Today you Fly"

Fitting advert in the airport in Zambia's biggest mining region:

Irreplaceable historical and cultural items like these need to be urgently relocated to a place where such crimes are non-existent, like Lusaka.

Sudan’s paramilitary killed hundreds including hospital patients in Darfur, residents say Sudan’s paramilitary forces killed hundreds of people including patients in a hospital after they seized el-Fasher city in the western Darfur region over the weekend, according to the UN, displaced re...

"UN refugee agency official Jacqueline Wilma Parlevliet said that the new arrivals told stories of widespread ethnic and politically motivated killings, including reports of people with disabilities shot dead because they were unable to flee"

this keeps getting worse

www.ctvnews.ca/world/articl...

Wow! Congratulations!

A history of currencies and monetary systems in the southern half of Africa African monetary systems were characterized by the concurrent use of classical (metal) currencies and commodity currencies that fulfilled a variety of functions.

A history of currencies and monetary systems in the southern half of Africa

www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/a-history-...

Ironically, this scam operated from the Kimberley Club, where mining magnates once engineered schemes to steal millions of pounds. Their present-day counterparts swindle a few thousand Rand from pensioners. A reflection of South Africa's economic decline.

An anatomy of an old-fashioned scam to fleece South African pensioners with fake mining investments in 'Acacia Gold':

www.boom2dust.nl/blog/acacia-...

It's surely impossible to know this in advance. My PhD, which I did at a UK university, was about a group of unionised white miners in Central Africa in the mid-c20th. An unlikely topic provide any economic value, but I've since been engaged by mining companies who wanted work on that exact topic.

There has sadly been little written about it and is now in danger of being forgotten. I will make the text of our article available once it has been published. It should be published in the next few weeks.

Guilty as charged. My next article:

It also chimes with a point raised by @eicathomefinn.bsky.social:

bsky.app/profile/eica...

"The article repeatedly makes sweeping assertions which, on the face of it, may sound logical, but only appear so if you have very little knowledge of the historical context being discussed."

This applies much more widely than Japanese history!

This is an important article that uses a debate over Koreans in 20th century Japan to make broader points about the use of history by non-experts, the peer review process and the kind of claims people make about the past.

Join us for the launch of
Henry Dee’s ‘Militant Migrants: Clements Kadalie, the ICU and the Mass Movement of Black Workers in Southern Africa, 1896-1951’. Published with @livunipress.bsky.social.
Marx Memorial Library, 29 November
sslh.org.uk/2025/10/27/b...

I didn't check the other topics as they don't interest me as much.

You can check the draft programme. According to the draft, there are 15 papers on mining and 12 are by presenters from African countries.

Looks like an interesting conference in Ghent on 4 December on 'Resources in Africa'.

Several papers on mining in the draft programme and its free to attend online:

www.africaplatform.ugent.be/event/intern...

Front cover of the Journal of Australasian Mining History from October 2025. The cover shows the journal title in red capitals and the tag line "Embracing all aspects of mining history, mining archaeology and heritage" The cover image is old mining equipment in a rural setting. Possibly a stamp mill. The bottom of the cover reads "Published by the Australasian Mining History Accociation"

No nonsense journal cover as well. Does what it says on the tin.

Born with a Copper Spoon Born with a Copper Spoon - A Global History of Copper, 1830–1980; Born with a Copper Spoon tells the fascinating and far-reaching story of one of the world’s most important metals.

More about the book here:

www.ubcpress.ca/born-with-a-...

Screenshot of a page of text. Text reads: "During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries copper was fundamentally entwined with the course of world history. While its use can be traced back to antiquity, it was in this period (as Born with a Copper Spoon so powerfully illustrates), that the metal first came to occupy a predominant role in shaping human society: The malleability, durability, tensile strength, resistance to corrosion, and, perhaps above all, conductive properties of copper made it the key ingredient of the Second Industrial Revolution and the first wave of globalization in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, as the essential component of undersea telegraph cables, copper literally connected the world. The lengthening of the day through artificial light, the generation of electric power, and the global spread of telecommunications all required copper, and their expansion was dependent on ever-increasing copper production. (p. 3). It is onto this broad canvas laid out by editors Robrecht Declercq, Duncan Money and"

Another positive review of our book 'Born with a Copper Spoon', this time in the Journal of Australasian Mining History.

I'm very pleased the reviewer Ben Mountford highlighted this paragraph from the introduction, which gets to the heart of why copper is important:

Me to junior colleagues: "You just have to say 'no' to stuff. Protect your time!"

Me to literally any request, no matter how trivial: "Wow I would love to help, thank you for considering me for this important responsibility."

This is the cover of The Continent (Issue 217) dated 25 October 2025. It is illustrated by Gado. At the top, under a bright orange and yellow sky, a small wooden boat floats empty on calm water. The sun hangs low, casting warm light on the surface. Below the surface, the scene turns dark blue and heavy. Beneath the water, there are people sinking or swimming desperately — arms outstretched, bubbles rising from their mouths. Some are fully submerged, others are half-visible. Their clothes, bags, and papers drift around them, mixed with scattered objects. The headline at the bottom reads: “Exodus: Why we leave Tigray.”

All Protocol Observed

Welcome to Issue 217 of The Continent

Three years after the guns fell silent, Tigray is breaking. Its youth are fleeing, its hope fading. One writer retraces his path from citizen to fighter to exile — and the ghosts that follow.

bit.ly/217_TC

How Napoleon’s army met its doom: DNA reveals surprise illnesses had a role Remains of some of the 300,000 soldiers who died on the retreat from Moscow reveal two bacterial diseases that probably added to the death count.

'“This paper will be really interesting to history buffs,” says Anne Stone, who researches anthropological genetics at Arizona State University in Tempe. “This study was done beautifully.”

There are simplistic 'history buffs', and then there are 'scientists', who get the complexity of the past. 1/2

"Elsewhere, polo is known as the sport of millionaires. Here, your fellow player may well be an underground electrician or plumber"

Colonial Zambia, according to one contemporary account, was "a paradise for the proletariat" and "a white workers' country"

Review: How to keep a promise Photos from a different time still need their space in today’s world. A commitment to archiving allows us to experience the stories behind them.

In 2002, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine's car broke down in the Ugandan town of Mbirizi. While waiting for repairs, he wandered off with his camera and stumbled on a small photo studio run by Ssalongo Kibaate Aloysius. That chance meeting sparked a 22-year journey to share Kibaate’s art with the world.

Probably just rehashing archive theory 101 here, but I wonder whether archival holdings for 1914-18 or 1939-45 are uniquely rich, because (among other reasons) the people selecting documents for preservation at the time were aware of the historic nature of the events at hand.

There was a larger state apparatus producing more documents during wartime as well.

Not so much "if something is free, you're the product" as "if something is free, you're the test subject"