"The strategic wolf hidden beneath the clothing of the economic sheep": Tin and the strategizing of raw materials

Citation

Perchard A (2014) "The strategic wolf hidden beneath the clothing of the economic sheep": Tin and the strategizing of raw materials. In: Ingulstad M, Perchard A & Storli E (eds.) Tin and Global Capitalism: A History of the Devil's Metal 1850-2000. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, pp. 240-270. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781317816157

Abstract
In 1937, the British political economist Alfred Plummer observed of German, Italian, and Japanese protests about geopolitical control of key raw materials: Is the strategic wolf hidden beneath the clothing of the economic sheep? On all the evidence the answer must be an affirmative. The Dissatisfied Powers are quite definitely war-minded at the present time, and this accounts for their desire to have political control over territories containing the sources of raw materials. Tin, Plummer felt, was a prime example of a politically contested raw material that needed to be controlled. And well he might: By 1935, the value of tin ore output from British Malaya alone had reached some £9.25m (£295.5m in 2012 prices), accounting for 88 percent of the value of mineral extraction from the colony and 43.9 percent of global output. Britain’s purchase over global tin was apparently considerable; she directly controlled seven out of the twenty votes on the International Tin Committee (and had considerable influence over Bolivia’s votes). Underlining perceptions of this, a leading contemporary political economist of commodities, Leo Fishman, observed in 1946: . . . The British government found little fault with the International Tin Committee and was, in fact, a partner in those operations. . . . had she been displeased with the program followed by the cartel, Great Britain could, as a last re-sort, have caused her colonies to with-draw from the scheme. Actually, with-drawal of the British colonies would probably have meant the end of the en-tire cartel. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, Fishman was overstating Britain’s real capacity for control within the shifting complexities of control over global tin supplies between the 1930s and 1950s, against a backdrop of international conflict and decolonization. Plummer’s 1937 warnings about the territorial ambitions of the Axis powers were certainly confirmed. The lack of preparedness to respond to Japanese expansion in Southeast Asia was evident in the rapid capture of British Malaya-almost coinciding with the attack on Pearl Harbor-and the Dutch East Indies. Japan’s territorial ambitions in the region, as Jonathan Marshall has argued, were driven by the desire to seize control of tin, as well as rubber and oil. In the first year of the European war, however, it was to be tin quotas and the fixing of maximum prices in Britain that created shortages in 1939. This saw a brief halt in Bolivian ore supplies in November and a temporary hold on the granting of export licenses by the Ministry of Supply. The problems of ore shortages had already been amply demonstrated to British smelters in 1935 after the implementation of the tin buffer pool. In the United States, between the wars, the importance of tin and dependency on imports was judged suffi cient to merit it being one of the few metals retained on the US list of strategic raw materials, as essential to national defense. This dependency on imports was to be a major source of contention between the US and Great Britain, as both White’s and Ingulstad’s chapters in this volume show. Jonas Scherner’s chapter indicates that the rhetoric of being a “have-not” nation “was used as a justification by the Nazis to carry out the autarky policy right from the beginnings of their seizure of power,” seen in their appropriation of stocks of the metal in occupied nations. However, Germany’s investment in research and development (R&D) and adoption of tin recovery techniques and substitution, show how historical contingencies can produce innovative adaptive practices.