The extraction of mineral resources has sharply increased over the past hundred years, and the ongoing transition to “green energy” creates social and political conflicts about minerals such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. SCARCE provides historical depth to modern principles of resource management (economic development, sustainability, technological innovation), and explores alternative forms of provisioning practiced in the past. Early modern Central Europe is an early site of capitalist extraction with a demand for specialist knowledge and a visible environmental impact. Placed in its global context, the region can help answer three interlocking questions: 

SCARCE makes research contributions on four levels: 

• Transdisciplinary: We consolidate insights from a transdisciplinary debate about historical resource regimes, informed by broader conversations in the social and environmental sciences.
• Disciplinary: We intervene in debates in three historical sub-disciplines on capitalism (social and economic history), expertise and innovation (history of science, technology and medicine), and sustainability (environmental history).
• Individual: We engage with specialist historiographies and questions relevant to our respective case-studies. This allows all members to raise their profile and engage field colleagues.
• Societal: We communicate our results to a larger public and potential policymakers to inform ongoing debates about resource use and allocation.

Historicising Resources

SCARCE builds on work in history of science and history of ideas that shows that the modern concept of resources was coined at the onset of industrialisation and consolidated during the mid-20th century. A recent Focus Section in the journal Isis, co-edited by Sebastian Felten and Renée Raphael (Felten, S., & Raphael, R. (2023). Early Modern Resources: An Introduction. Isis, 114(3), 599-603. doi.org/10.1086/726186), describes three research avenues to study resources avant la lettre:

• to follow actors’ reliance on agriculture as a means of conceptualizing their activities of provisioning
• to read for religious connotations actors make, and
• to study actors’ political economies through references to common good, common land, and community.

The following features distinguish mineral resources from other resources: 

• site specificity, often in remote areas, which prompted built environments with unusual infrastructures
• inaccessibility, which prompted accumulations of capital, technology, and expertise
• exhaustibility, which prompted specific temporal regimes
• toxicity, in varying degrees, which prompted conceptual and practical work to mitigate adverse impacts on human health and natural environments

The focus on minerals channels our general aim of historicising resources (shared with forest, water, and agricultural history) into concrete Focus Themes:

• Political Economy of Minerals
• Mineral Expertise
• Mineral Temporality

We develop these themes by bringing the original project proposal more in line with actual research carried out.

SCARCE is hosted by the History Department, which in turn is part of the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies. Team members will work closely with colleagues from the Key Research Area History of Science.

The Advisory Board consists of Oscar Gelderblom (University of Antwerp), Andrew Mendelsohn (Queen Mary University London), László Kontler (Central European University), Ulinka Rublack (University of Cambridge) and Pamela Smith (Columbia University).

The project is running from 1 November 2023 until 31 October 2028.

You can watch a video of the presentation given by SCARCE's research team at the project's Kick-Off event below.