Approach

SCARCE will put special emphasis on administrative writing as a rich and polyphonic genre that speaks to all issues equally. Reports were written by administrators at all levels of the hierarchy. They often describe a situation from multiple angles, and use maps, diagrams, and accounting to make their arguments more persuasive. They tend to integrate knowledge of different origins (scholarly, artisanal, archival, personal) and usually have a clear practical aim. They contain information about the views of investors and workers. Several thousands of these reports are available in public archives that today house the paperwork of historical mining administrations, including those in Banská Štiavnica (Slovakia), Prague (Czech Republic), Freiberg, Dresden, Clausthal-Zellerfeld (Germany), Vienna, and Innsbruck (Austria). The selection of archives will be based on the requirements of the individual projects. Each investigator will use additional materials to answer their individual research questions. This may include, for example, investors’ family papers and notarial archives, lore recorded in the 19th century, as well as material culture that is preserved and catalogued in museums and local history collections.

To ensure comparable results, we work with a shared methodical framework based on historical epistemology. The fundamental method is hermeneutical: we will read texts, visuals and objects in order to reconstruct the meaning that historical actors would have drawn from them. We will study offices and on-site inspections as epistemic settings for governance, just as laboratories and field work that are settings for science (= history of bureaucratic knowledge). We will continue to work on a shared method as we carry out the different research projects.

To structure the area of investigation, SCARCE will combine methods of microhistory and global history. Mining administrations were more or less powerful vis-à-vis investors, depending on the territory. The selection of cases will be guided by the institutional framework that they represent. This will allow us to compare Central European territories to other important early modern metal mining regions in Iberian America, West Africa, and East Asia.

To divide the task into manageable research projects, SCARCE will focus on four interlocking processes that sustained mining in Central Europe: pooling capital, scaling plans, reproducing labour, and managing health and pollution (see Themes). Historiographically, each topic is placed at a different intersection between history of science and technology, social and economic history, and environmental history. This allows SCARCE to integrate debates across these fields. Conceptually, this four-pronged approach explores an intersection of labour, capital, and scale: A survival strategy of Central European state-managed mining was to increase the scale of planning and investment, which created tensions with the rhythms and exigencies of labouring bodies not unlike to those in modern manufacturing. A fifth project, led by the PI, contextualises Central European state-managed mining as it establishes comparisons and entanglements of Central Europe with other mining regions of the early modern world.

To enhance our ability to process manuscript materials quickly, SCARCE will transcribe and annotate administrative reports using Transkribus (https://readcoop.eu/). This tool’s core capability is optical character recognition (OCR) that automatically transcribes historical handwriting into digital text. It has proved promising for files of the Swedish Bureau of Mines. For selected documents, we will use Transkribus’ annotation function to mark up places and persons. This data will then be exported into a custom-built relational database which will allow us to keep track of historical actors as we work our way through a lot of administrative paperwork.