(Re)Making Svalbard’s Marble Island: Marketing the Sublime and Mythologising the More-Than-Human

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard was recast as a site of mineral possibility. This article traces one effort at industrial extraction there: a marble quarry which, according to the British Northern Exploration Company that ran it, would supply the world with marble of unparalleled quality and beauty for generations. In attempting to incorporate Arctic material into global capitalist markets, the NEC leveraged the residual yet powerful trope of the Arctic Sublime to position its marble as uniquely plentiful and otherworldly. As was common in efforts to extract resources from remote locations, the NEC’s marble quarry was short-lived. More uniquely, its failure has been mythologised in equally sublime terms: the marble, said to have crumbled to pieces as it was shipped south, is today held up as an example of more-than-human resistance to capitalist expansion. In this article I propose that both these accounts of Svalbard’s marble sublimate the complex ecologies and geologies of the Arctic, thereby obscuring the nuances and specificities of the land itself. After recounting the history of Marble Island and the fractures between the material and ideological that played out there during and after its time as a quarry, I turn to geohistory to reorient to the deep, complex and dynamic space and time of Arctic rock. I argue that the scalar and vertical shift of geohistory is essential in reframing historical narratives and engagements with the nonhuman, offering a chance of ‘reading beyond capital,’ and, in this instance, beyond the sublime.