This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder.
This publication is part of the project “Boom to Dust: The Environmental History of Three Industrial Mining Centres in Southern Africa, 1870–2020”, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO, project number 406.23.FHR.002). Open Access of this publication was made possible by additional NWO funding.
Cover illustration: ‘The Big Hole’ in Kimberly, South Africa, Photo by Jan-Bart Gewald (2024)
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 1568-1777
ISBN 978-90-04-74931-3 (paperback)
ISBN 978-90-04-74932-0 (e-book)
DOI 10.1163/9789004749320
Copyright 2026 by Jan-Bart Gewald, Sabine Luning and Harry Wels. Published by Koninklijke Brill BV, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Netherlands.
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