The history of mining education in late Qing China has received relatively little attention in scholarly literature. Through the lens of institutionalising global mining knowledge, this article addresses the following questions: How did the demand for expertise within the framework of mining bureaucracy evolve under the impact of Western imperialism? How did mining education enter scholarly discourse and become eventually institutionalised in the late Qing China? Drawing on evidence from the collections of Sheng Xuanhuai's archive series, it investigates two previously overlooked ‘failures’ of Sheng's mining-related enterprises, namely his earliest mining practices in Hubei in the 1870s and his proposal for establishing a mining school in Shandong in 1888–89. It then reconnects these efforts with the histories of Western learning, late Qing mining bureaucracy, the monetary crisis of that era, and the global recruitment of engineers despite a pronounced distrust of foreign expertise. It argues that these seemingly discrete efforts or ‘failures’ in fact paved the way for initiating China's first engineering university as well as other mining colleges in around 1895 and eventually led to the rise of engineering education before the entire educational system was transformed in China.

This article examines the transnational circulation of American mine engineers between the United States, southern Africa, and the Americas in the late nineteenth century. Technology and knowledge was diffused worldwide with the circulation of American engineers who styled themselves as expert race managers as they compared the labour practices of mines across the world. The article's focus is the extension of the United States’ global footprint to South Africa, where an expatriate ‘colony’ of American engineers created a resilient form of Anglo-American inter-imperial collaboration. As they worked the Rand, American engineers made transnational comparisons of South African and North and South American mines. In the process, they led a global discussion of the efficiency of mining labour that reified white management of other races. After leaving the Rand, American engineers migrated across the globe, many to Mexico, where the interwoven networks of expert knowledge, industrial capitalism, and transnational race-making that characterized late nineteenth-century global mining followed.