Between The Plough And The Pick

y global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers-erstwhile peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway out of oppressive poverty). The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small scale miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities and landscapes of resource access and control. This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics, mineral dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and commodities, and their multiple meanings.

The Strength, Fracture and Workability of Coal deals with the strength of coal and the way in which various aspects of strength enter into the processes of mechanical winning. This book aims to provide rationalization of the design of coal winning machines for use in British mines and an increase of efficiency in existing machines. This book is composed of 14 chapters, and begins with a description of a stratified structure comprising a number of components of coal. This topic is followed by detailed measurements on a bituminous and an anthracite coal using static and dynamic techniques. The subsequent chapters are devoted to the definition and determination of coal's mechanical properties, such as compressive, tensile, and routine strength, particle size distribution, breakage, friction, and wedge penetration. The concluding chapters cover the mechanics of certain possible modes of interaction of coal and tool. These chapters also examine the theoretical aspects of the cutting and ploughing of coal. This book will prove useful to coal mining engineers, designers, and researchers.