Duncan Money

Historian, Researcher and Writer

About

I’m a freelance historian and researcher and I write about the mining industry and Southern Africa. Almost anything that isn’t grown is, ultimately, mined and I have been fascinated by mining my entire life, by the idea of a vast subterranean world beneath our feet, invisible from the surface.

I have worked as a consultant for museums, multilateral financial institutions and development agencies on projects about institutional history, trade and staff development. I also regularly write briefings about the contemporary mining industry.

I was awarded my PhD in history from Oxford University in 2016 and in 2022 I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. My first book White Mineworkers on Zambia’s Copperbelt was published in 2021 and I’m the co-editor of Born with a Copper Spoon: A Global History of Copper (2022) and Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa (2020). Reviews have described my books as “eloquently written”, “an incredibly rich book that deserves to be widely read” and “tells a story of fundamental importance to understanding the world system that we have inherited.”

I’ve written extensively on migration, race, labour and the mining industry. I try to make my work as accesible as possible and so this website hosts Open Access versions of my academic publications. You can also read my work in Africa is a Country, Times Higher Education, The Conversation and Jstor Daily.

Previously, I worked as an academic and had positions at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the University of the Free State in South Africa, Stanford University’s UK campus and Oxford University. I’ve also held visiting positions at at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Along with my own research, you can also find information about the work of my PhD students on this site.

on this site

Sources for the History of the Copperbelt
An extensive annotated list of archives and online sources about the recent past of the Copperbelt.

Digitising the Mineworkers’ Union of Zambia archives
Information about the project I ran to preserve and digitise this archive.