British Investment in the American Mining Frontier

British involvement in the American mining frontier presents us with an interesting conundrum. On the one hand, British miners, managers, and engineers played a major role in bringing locally-owned and promoted ventures into short-term profit and successful long-term development. On the other hand, direct investments in the same mining districts undertaken by British owned companies met with near universal failure and bankruptcy. Our question, therefore, is why was British labor so effective but British enterprise so inept? The answer that will be proposed is that while British labor, management, and expertise was steeped in experience gathered from generations working in the world's leading mining industry, the promoters and investors in overseas mining had litde personal familiarity with the domestic industry and no real practical knowledge on which to base informed judgements about he value of the property they were acquiring.