Mining Central European Archives: Some Notes on Method

Sebastian Felten is a historian of science, finance, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. He is Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (MPIWG) between 2015 and 2018. He is the PI of the ERC Project SCARCE. His current research explores knowledge about nature through a focus on mineral resources as they featured in metallurgy, mineralogy, economics, and ergonomics. He has studied commerce and bureaucracy using the tools of historical epistemology to build bridges between the history of science and social, cultural and economic history. His objective for the next years is to apply this integrated approach to understand the peculiar rationality of early modern resource extraction in Central Europe, which was often highly contradictory. 

Claire Conklin Sabel is a historian of early modern earth sciences, extractive industries, and empire, with expertise in Dutch and British empires in Southeast Asia. Her research explores how knowledge about the earth and environment were shaped by the growth of European imperialism and overseas trade in the Indian Ocean. She received her PhD in History of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project SCARCE, and is affiliated with the Key Research Area in History of Science. Her current project aims to produce a critical history of natural resource management, focusing on Central Europe in a global perspective.

Sebastian Leitner is a historian specializing in the social, economic, and environmental history of early modern and late medieval Europe. He studied history and geography at the universities of Zurich and Vienna (one semester). In his master's thesis, which he completed at the Department of History at Zurich, he analyzed practices of debt-making in an everyday economy through private late medieval account books. As part of the ERC project SCARCE, Sebastian is conducting research for his PhD thesis on the provisioning and management of energy resources—especially wood, charcoal, and water—used to process ores from extraction to melting. His goal is to understand how different actors within mining regions managed these resources to run their mining enterprises "sustainably." Currently, he is focusing on the Habsburg imperial administration of precious metal extraction in the lower Hungarian mining towns (present-day Slovakia) after the incorporation of the Kingdom of Hungary in the 16th century.