The “move south” of the aluminium industry is still ongoing. Today, most of the world’s aluminium production takes place, as discussed in this issue, in the largest emerging economies on the planet: China, India, Indonesia, and the Gulf States. These countries combine enabling factors such as economies of scale, access to capital, strong linkages with other domestic sectors, and strategic state guidance. Consequently, aluminium production has become increasingly disconnected from bauxite extraction. This has not always been the case. In earlier decades, it was in the small developing countries where the initial bauxite discoveries were made that the belief arose that these subsoil resources could offer them a pathway out of poverty and toward development, progress, and modernity.
This portfolio presents photographic heritage from one such country: Suriname, which was a Dutch colony until 1975. After bauxite had been identified here in 1901, from 1915 onward the country entered a “bauxite frenzy”, fuelled by the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) buying up concessions (Lamur, 1983). These concessions were gradually transformed into mines: Alcoa started off by opening a mine in Moengo in 1916, and in 1938 mining took off in two separate concessions in Paranam, owned by Alcoa and the Dutch mining company Billiton, respectively. The opening of both mining areas was importantly triggered by military demands, given the (tensions of) war both in the 1910s and the 1930s.
Life in Suriname’s colonial bauxite towns reflected sharp contrasts…