Global Mining Industries and Elkington's 1851 Commemorative Wares

By Caitlin Beach

For the occasion of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851, the Birmingham-based metal goods firm Elkington, Mason, and Co. (later Elkington & Co.) issued a set of souvenir electrotyped wares. One of these objects was a lavish silver-plated tray, designed in collaboration with the illustrator John Leighton, which featured a large globe in high relief surrounded by vignettes of craft and commerce. The imagery of this tray and the material of which it is composed are, in a sense, self-referential. They index the world of industry and manufacturing from which the tray comes, and more specifically, the extractive economies to uphold that world.

The scenes on the tray’s shallow basin are befitting of an object created to commemorate the Great Exhibition’s triumphant celebration of British art and industry. An ornamental banner snakes around the edge of the central relief, bearing the surnames of figures from the history of design and manufacturing from the Italian Renaissance on: Benvenuto Cellini, Albrecht Durer, Johannes Gutenberg, and Hans Holbein, as well as modern British figures like Joseph Arkwright, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgwood. These names surround vignettes – nine in total – featuring scenes of art, artisans, and industry. Much like the longer tradition of Enlightenment-era occupational portraits or depictions of métier, each vignette condenses work into a single metonymic figure, shown labouring with the tools of his trade.

The centre of the tray features a large globe in high relief bounded by the words ‘raw material,’ ‘manufactures,’ and ‘commerce’. The globe is turned to show a view of the Western Hemisphere, with various places labelled. This text seems inconsistent and haphazard, resembling more closely handwritten lettering than the stylised neo-Gothic script found on other parts of the tray. Some continents are labelled (South America, Africa), but the North American landmass says only ‘states’. Europe is labelled simply with the cities ‘London and Paris’. There are also references to geography and bodies of water – the Sahara, the North and South Atlantic Oceans, and perhaps most strikingly, the label ‘La Plate’ at the edge of the eastern side of South America. This is the Rio de la Plata, or the River Plate, whose mouth opens at the border of present-day Argentina and Uruguay.

This reference to the Rio de la Plata is not at all arbitrary, for European colonial powers had long regarded the waterway as an important natural resource. Indeed, the silver and copper necessary for electrotyping and electroplating were sourced through colonial circuits of extraction. In the 1840s, Elkington pursued investments in a joint-stock company called the River Plate Steam Navigation Company. The company’s archival records reveal how they saw the river as a rich resource for their mining interests; in 1846, Henry Elkington wrote of his desire to ‘permanently secure the navigation of the River Plate and its tributaries.’ The venture failed because of geopolitical realities of the day, as the river was blockaded from 1845 to 1850 during the Uruguayan Civil War, itself a struggle over Argentine and Uruguayan sovereignty in the face of British and French military incursions. But Elkington nevertheless continued to source their silver under exploitative conditions in the so-called ‘New World’; for much of the century they maintained ties to the Cornish-run silver mines of Real del Monte in Mexico, which operated through enslaved and coerced Black and Indigenous labour.

It is this history that animates the ornamental and refined – in multiple senses of the word – silver surface of Elkington’s commemorative tray. The art of electrotyping was often regarded in its day as a modern marvel, a kind of latter-day alchemy in objects emerged fully formed from an electrochemical bath. Yet the metamorphoses to inhere in Elkington’s electrotype went beyond this scientific sorcery, and extended to the very real economies of extraction, transformation, and theft in the colonial mining ventures so central to their industrial enterprise.

Dr Caitlin Meehye Beach is Assistant Professor of Art History and affiliated faculty in African & African American Studies at Fordham University. She is the author of Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery (University of California Press, 2022).