• Date: 26 September 2024, 13:15–15:00
• Location: 6-3025 (Rausingrummet)
• Type: Seminar
• Organiser: Department of History of Science and Ideas
• Contact person: Jacob Orrje
• Higher Seminar in the History of Science and Ideas

Early modern mining and metalworking has long been of interest to European historians with an interest in the industrial and scientific revolutions, with comprehensive studies that have deeply influenced developments within the respective fields of economic and social history, the history technology, and the history of science and ideas. In the past decades, new theoretical approaches and novel methods have emerged, which have partly revised the traditional historiography of early modern metal production, including perspectives from environmental history, history of knowledge, global history, and the history of coercion. This departmental seminar consists of presentations from three projects that all contribute to this new historiography of early modern mining and metalworking.

­­­Patrick Anthony: Toward extractive histories of science

This talk works toward extractive histories of science that go beyond the social construction of knowledge. At stake here is the complementary question of how sciences enact new environmental and political realities on the ground, as above and below it. I look specifically at sciences assembled along the itineraries of Prussian savant Alexander von Humboldt, which linked mineral frontiers from Prussia to colonial Mexico and Russian Siberia across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Coal figures in some accounts of the period as the mineral that turned industrial capitalism to “vertical frontiers.” But vertical frontiers were well-established by this time, as agents of global mining industries combined earth and atmospheric sciences. A history of those sciences shows carbonization rather as an extension of earlier mineral frontiers, based primarily in hard rock mining. That is because mineral coal was not merely a commodity to European mining and forestry bureaus, but a solution to perceived timber shortages and, by extension, to climate change itself. This talk therefore revisits the co-production of climate change science and coal-fired industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. It explores continuities in the logic of the mineral frontier, from early modernity to “green” energy transitions. And it suggests how an extractive history of science might yet disrupt them.

Patrick Anthony is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Partner in “Instructing Natural History: Nature, People, Empire” at Uppsala University.

Sebastian Felten: The Value of Bureaucracy: Files as a Source for the History of Resource Knowledge

How have procedures of administrative writing shaped the economic and scientific value of minerals? This talk draws on material from early modern Saxony whose state-directed mining sector is considered a birthplace of both modern geology and resource economics. Instructions, reports, and meeting minutes were written and annotated by experts ranging from mud-drenched foremen to councillors at court. While these texts are structured by formal hierarchies — they instruct down, report up, or record deliberation among peers —the contents are surprisingly polyphonic. They contain the opinions of scholars, female and male investors, local residents and workers. It is difficult to generalise from these records, though recent advances in handwritten-text recognition make it easier to deal with their bulk and repetitiveness. In this talk, I will compare administrative text to image-making and material culture in mining; and to collective text composition in early modern sciences. This dual comparison helps to better understand the promises and limitations of administrative writing as a source for the history of resource knowledge.

The talk is given in the framework of SCARCE (Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resource Extraction in Central Europe, 1550-1850). This ERC Starting Grant project aims to provide a history of today's stakeholder conflicts by showing how contradictory principles of resource management – economic development, sustainability, and technological innovation – were forged in protoindustrial settings. SCARCE investigates four interlocking processes that sustained mining in Central Europe: pooling capital, scaling plans, reproducing labour, and managing health and pollution (https://scarce.univie.ac.at/).

Sebastian Felten is Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Vienna.

Måns Jansson & Jacob Orrje: The geographies of mining knowledge in early modern Swedish state making

Early modern mines were subterranean roots from which fiscal-military states drew military and economic power. To improve this vital trade, fledgling European mining administrations encouraged the gathering of useful knowledge in many forms. One case in point was the Swedish Bergskollegium. For over 100 years – from the late seventeenth century until the early 1800s – it maintained a program of intelligent travel, sending its officials to mining and metal-working communities across Europe as well as within the Swedish realm. The notes and reports by the travelers were one vital ingredient in a collective effort to compile state-of-the-art knowledge. At the same time, the kollegium established an infrastructure for how information was gathered and processed, which consisted of several interlinked components: a central archive in Stockholm, decentralized mining districts [Bergmästardömen], and protocols for how mobile officials and useful knowledge should circulate between these entities.

Using a combination of methods and theories from digital history and global history of science and technology, our project emphasizes different aspects of this material, such as: the transnational sinews of state-related knowledge gathering, the practices and infrastructures observed and employed by the travelers, and long-term trends of technical change and state making in early modern hand-written archives. More specifically, we focus on three sets of practices: first, the work techniques of craftsmen and miners; second, methods for organising these workers as well as the trade of metals; and third, administrative work of circulating and systematising knowledge about the previously mentioned practices. In studying these three sets of practices and relating them to each other, we aim to propose new ways of understanding how knowing, moving, and doing were intertwined in historical state administrations.

Måns Jansson is a researcher in economic history at Uppsala University. Jacob Orrje is a researcher in history of science and ideas at Uppsala University, and a digital historian of science at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

For more information visit the Uppsala University Website.