This sweeping, global history of manganese from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century makes important contributions to the fields of Latin American history, United States foreign relations, the history of industrialization, and the history of mining. Priest makes a persuasive case for the importance of manganese in the rise of the world steel industry and the emergence of a global economy in the twentieth century. Manganese, as he emphasizes, gives “steel its toughness, making it the finest structural material ever created, essential for advanced war making and heavy industry” (p. xiv). In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of the Bessemer process for converting iron to steel, the pursuit of manganese became crucial to the emerging steel industry. The largest high-grade manganese deposits were located in Brazil, India, and Russia; “Big Steel’s strategies were aggressive and predatory, aimed at gaining control over world production and prices” (p....

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