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This book paints a vivid picture of Zambia´s experience riding the copper price rollercoaster. It brings together the best of recent research on Zambia´s mining industry from eminent scholars in history, geography, anthropology, politics, sociology and economics. The authors discuss how aid donors pressed Zambia to privatize its key industry and how multinational mining houses took advantage of tax-breaks and lax regulation. It considers the opportunities and dangers presented by Chinese investment, how both companies and the Zambian state responded to dramatic instabilities in global commodity markets since 2004, and how frustration with the courting of mining multinationals has led to the rise of populist opposition. This detailed study of a key industry in a poor Central African state tells us a great deal about the unstable nature and uneven impacts of the whole global economic system.

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Boom and bust on the Zambian Copperbelt; A.Fraser Historical Perspectives on Zambia´s Mining Booms and Busts; M.Larmer The Economics of the Copper Price Boom in Zambia; C.S.Adam & A.M.Simpasa From Boom to Bust: Diversity and Regulation in Zambia´s Privatised Copper Sector; D.Haglund Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa´s Chinese Enclaves; C.Kwan Lee African Miners and Shape Shifting Flight Capital: The Case of Baluba Luanshya; J.Gewald & S.Soeters Contesting Illegality: Women in the Informal Copper Business; P.Mususa The Mining Boom, Capital and Chiefs in the ´New Copperbelt´; R.Negi Mining, Dispossession and Transformation in Africa; R.Bush

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ALASTAIR FRASER is the Philomathia Fellow and College Lecturer in Politics at Cambridge University, UK.

MILES LARMER is Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield, UK.

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