Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resources in Central Europe, 1550-1850

ongoing

Early modern mining often played out as a drama in three acts: I. Ores are Discovered, II. Communities Flourish, III. The Mines Collapse. Across Central Europe, however, this drama took an unusual turn: emerging territorial states stepped in to reorganise the sector and suspended the collapse of mining for years, decades, and centuries. Understanding why and how state-employed administrators prolonged the lifespan of mines has great potential to advance debates in economic history, history of science and technology, and environmental history. The principal aim of this project is to open up the history of resource management as a field of study whose questions and results are equally well integrated in these three fields. It will use Central European mining as a high-stakes case to prove the viability of such a history. By doing so, it will provide (1) a new account of capitalist development by showing how an industry in seemingly underdeveloped Central Europe shaped two important building blocks of modern economies: the rationalisation of labour, and the accumulation of capital. (2) a new understanding of technoscientific innovation in proto-industrial settings by showing how administrative procedures (accounting, reporting) shaped scientists/technicians’ understanding of natural processes. (3) a new genealogy for modern sustainability by focusing attention on the contradictions that shaped the extraction of non-renewable resources. To achieve these aims, four researchers (1 PI, 1 Postdoc, 2 PhD) will analyse thousands of administrative reports from across Central Europe, using a new method, history of bureaucratic knowledge, based on recent advances in the history of science. They will work on four processes through which administrators made mining a long-term enterprise: (a) rationalising labour, (b) managing health and pollution, (c) sustaining investment, and (d) long-term planning.