GOLD
The Race for the World's Most
Seductive Metal
Mathew Hart
Simon & Schuster; 290 pages; Rs 499
There is plenty of evidence in the book to support the two statements. The avarice that fuels the industry runs like a thread through the book. The Spaniards in their thirst for gold in the 16th century destroyed a civilisation in South America; in South Africa, thieves operate an illegal mining industry that siphons off anything between $1 billion and $2 billion of the country's gold ore a year; in China, thousands of illegal miners are spread throughout the country's gold-bearing regions, running a cottage industry; and in parts of Africa, gold (along with diamonds) finances tribal feuds and civil wars that have claimed millions of lives.
In a hundred years, Spanish treasure ships increased Europe's gold supply by five times. Awash in money, countries struggled to manage commerce among themselves until, at the start of the 19th century, they brought the gold standard into being. It required a nation's currency supply to match the amount of gold bullion in reserve at a stipulated ratio. Its effect was so disruptive that Mr Hart asks whether this solution "bent gold to our will or bent us to gold's". The author is inclined to believe that it is the latter.
Impeccably researched, Gold inundates the reader with an avalanche of facts and figures gathered during the author's travels through Africa, Europe, the United States and China, with repetitive accounts of how seemingly unimpressive mines regularly turned into the most productive sources of gold. But the book has an interesting cast of characters, including geologists who like nothing better than to spend their time walking in the mountains prospecting for gold, and top executives who live the most adventurous lives.
There is Mark Bristow, CEO of Randgold Resources, who hurls himself out of airplanes for 30-second freefalls, shoots the rapids on the Zambezi, goes bungee jumping at the Victoria Falls, and once worked on a strategy to thwart a rival's takeover bid during a 49-day motorcycle trip from Cape Town to Cairo; Lukas Lundin, the scion of a Swedish oil-and-mining dynasty, who has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, competed in the Paris-Dakar motorcycle rally, and "liked to plunge down thickly wooded mountainsides in pursuit of the thrill of extreme skiing". And Tye Burt, boss of Kinross Gold Corp, "had run with the bulls three times at the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain".
The two most riveting chapters are on gold mining in China, which has overtaken South Africa as the world's largest producer of the metal, and India as the world's biggest importer of gold. Mr Hart dwells extensively on the perils of doing business in China, as Western mining companies have found to their cost. China invited foreign companies to prospect for gold in 1993, after subduing "the natural animosity of communist ideology to a substance so quintessentially the stuff of private wealth". However, when some companies actually did discover gold, the government in Beijing held back business and mining licences, effectively seizing the mines and appropriating the gold. Mr Hart writes: "When it comes to mining gold, the whole of China is a bandit circus."
Nine of the book's 12 chapters are just what the subtitle says; one chronicles the role of gold in determining the value of currency, another is about gold trading, and a third is an absorbing account of how President Richard Nixon sent the gold standard into history. Mr Hart is critical of the functioning of gold-backed currency markets: "The strict operation of the gold standard sent regular waves of misery through the world, as the vagaries of trade would drain a gold supply and lacerate an economy." Finally, in August 1971, when the US had been hit by trade and current account deficits, as well as by inflation, and its gold stock was rapidly dwindling, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, forever ending the idea of gold as money.
Mr Hart ends his journey at the Kibali gold mine in the strife-torn Democratic Republic of Congo because, he writes, "it captures the thrill of a modern gold rush, its speed and ruthlessness, and also because it shows how unsettling and barbarous gold can be, and then again, how fortunate to find". This could be said of most chapters in the book.
What of the future? Mr Hart writes that the search for gold has now moved to the oceans. A Canadian company has a 20-year lease on a target in the southwestern Pacific, while the Chinese are developing a submersible to explore deep-sea gold deposits and have acquired the rights to 3,860 square miles of seabed on a two-mile-deep volcanic rift in the Indian Ocean. In a few years more, Mr Hart may have material enough for another book on gold mining.
The Race for the World's Most
Seductive Metal
Mathew Hart
Simon & Schuster; 290 pages; Rs 499
More From This Section
Towards the middle of Gold, Mathew Hart quotes an old prospector in John Huston's 1948 gold hunt movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as saying, "I know what gold does to men's souls." To which Mr Hart - a veteran journalist and former editor of a diamond trade magazine, whose earlier books have been on the diamond mining industry and Canada's gold rush - adds, "Gold and crime go hand in hand."
There is plenty of evidence in the book to support the two statements. The avarice that fuels the industry runs like a thread through the book. The Spaniards in their thirst for gold in the 16th century destroyed a civilisation in South America; in South Africa, thieves operate an illegal mining industry that siphons off anything between $1 billion and $2 billion of the country's gold ore a year; in China, thousands of illegal miners are spread throughout the country's gold-bearing regions, running a cottage industry; and in parts of Africa, gold (along with diamonds) finances tribal feuds and civil wars that have claimed millions of lives.
In a hundred years, Spanish treasure ships increased Europe's gold supply by five times. Awash in money, countries struggled to manage commerce among themselves until, at the start of the 19th century, they brought the gold standard into being. It required a nation's currency supply to match the amount of gold bullion in reserve at a stipulated ratio. Its effect was so disruptive that Mr Hart asks whether this solution "bent gold to our will or bent us to gold's". The author is inclined to believe that it is the latter.
Impeccably researched, Gold inundates the reader with an avalanche of facts and figures gathered during the author's travels through Africa, Europe, the United States and China, with repetitive accounts of how seemingly unimpressive mines regularly turned into the most productive sources of gold. But the book has an interesting cast of characters, including geologists who like nothing better than to spend their time walking in the mountains prospecting for gold, and top executives who live the most adventurous lives.
There is Mark Bristow, CEO of Randgold Resources, who hurls himself out of airplanes for 30-second freefalls, shoots the rapids on the Zambezi, goes bungee jumping at the Victoria Falls, and once worked on a strategy to thwart a rival's takeover bid during a 49-day motorcycle trip from Cape Town to Cairo; Lukas Lundin, the scion of a Swedish oil-and-mining dynasty, who has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, competed in the Paris-Dakar motorcycle rally, and "liked to plunge down thickly wooded mountainsides in pursuit of the thrill of extreme skiing". And Tye Burt, boss of Kinross Gold Corp, "had run with the bulls three times at the festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain".
The two most riveting chapters are on gold mining in China, which has overtaken South Africa as the world's largest producer of the metal, and India as the world's biggest importer of gold. Mr Hart dwells extensively on the perils of doing business in China, as Western mining companies have found to their cost. China invited foreign companies to prospect for gold in 1993, after subduing "the natural animosity of communist ideology to a substance so quintessentially the stuff of private wealth". However, when some companies actually did discover gold, the government in Beijing held back business and mining licences, effectively seizing the mines and appropriating the gold. Mr Hart writes: "When it comes to mining gold, the whole of China is a bandit circus."
Nine of the book's 12 chapters are just what the subtitle says; one chronicles the role of gold in determining the value of currency, another is about gold trading, and a third is an absorbing account of how President Richard Nixon sent the gold standard into history. Mr Hart is critical of the functioning of gold-backed currency markets: "The strict operation of the gold standard sent regular waves of misery through the world, as the vagaries of trade would drain a gold supply and lacerate an economy." Finally, in August 1971, when the US had been hit by trade and current account deficits, as well as by inflation, and its gold stock was rapidly dwindling, President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, forever ending the idea of gold as money.
Mr Hart ends his journey at the Kibali gold mine in the strife-torn Democratic Republic of Congo because, he writes, "it captures the thrill of a modern gold rush, its speed and ruthlessness, and also because it shows how unsettling and barbarous gold can be, and then again, how fortunate to find". This could be said of most chapters in the book.
What of the future? Mr Hart writes that the search for gold has now moved to the oceans. A Canadian company has a 20-year lease on a target in the southwestern Pacific, while the Chinese are developing a submersible to explore deep-sea gold deposits and have acquired the rights to 3,860 square miles of seabed on a two-mile-deep volcanic rift in the Indian Ocean. In a few years more, Mr Hart may have material enough for another book on gold mining.