Woloson, "'Fence-ing lessons': child junkers and the commodification of scrap in the long nineteenth century" (Business History 61(1), 2019)

Disposition: stated. Long passages of the open-access text read via search on 2026-10-19, not the whole article.

What: a history of who supplied scrap metal to American industry from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. Why: it shows that the secondary-metal supply began as a trade of the poorest people at the edge of the city, and that turning their pickings into a commodity was also what erased them from the record. Bears on macro-view (who does secondary extraction) and on thread-convivial-computation (the informal edge beneath a material economy).

Key points, as read:

• Immigrant pickers and poor boys were "some of the most reliable suppliers of raw materials for the junk trade". In 1849-50 they were reported stripping copper sheathing, lead and copper pipe, brass and tin roofing from wharves and unfinished houses.
• The trade had tiers (Zimring: collectors, peddlers, dealers, processors, brokers). In the 1870s a young junker made about 50 cents a day; dealers worked on thin margins, one clearing half a cent a pound.
• The argument: aggregation and resale "laundered" scrap from individual, often stolen things into abstract commodities, and in doing so hid the labour at the source. By the early twentieth century junk dealing was a consolidated industry.

URL: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00076791.2017.1294161 (read 2026-10-19). Related: Zimring, Cash for Your Trash (2005), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hj417 (catalogue only).

Backlinks: macro-view, bt-openreach-copper-recovery-2026, trail-2026-10-19