Description

The world is desperate for cobalt It drives the proliferation of digital and clean technologies But this demon metal has a horrific present and a troubled history

The modern search for cobalt has brought investors back to a small town in Northern Canada a place called Cobalt Like the demon metal this town has a dark and turbulent history

The tale of the earlytwentiethcentury mining rush at Cobalt has been told as a settles adventure but Indigenous people had already been trading in metals from the region for two thousand years And the events that happened herethe theft of Indigenous lands the exploitation of a multicultural workforce and the destruction of the natural environmentestablished a template for resource extraction that has been exported around the world

Charlie Angus reframes the complex and intersectional history of Cobalt within a broader international framefrom the conquistadores to the Western gold rush to the struggles in the Democratic Republic of Congo today He demonstrates how Cobalt set Canada on its path to become the worlds dominant mining superpower