Research themes
Pooling capital
Mining often prompted actors to pool capital in joint-ownership arrangements. In Central Europe, this was done predominantly through public institutions provided by emerging states. This research project seeks to answer the question of how capital was accumulated and managed in Central European mining. This question cannot be answered with available research on investors and their portfolios, which is especially sparse for the period after the 16th-century boom period. This is not for a lack of sources, as tax lists and ownership records tend to be better preserved from 1600 onwards than for the period before. A promising research avenue is to complement a quantitative approach with the microhistorical analysis of salient individuals and families, tracing their strategies through personal papers. Collecting and analysing this data can reveal where capital originated, how much dividend was returned, and how investors’ commitment reacted to cameralist policies of ‘sustainable’ mining, i.e. administrators’ attempts to retain profit for reinvestment in the mines. This project will result in a fuller history of early modern capitalism by shedding light on private-public interactions in Central Europe. It is an unexplored question whether and to what extent investors in Central European mines knew, and were able to comprehend, the practical-technical and increasingly scientific basis for managerial decisions. To what extent did Central European mining after 1550 depend on ‘savant entrepreneurs’ who had enough technical knowledge to endorse innovation, and not ‘vote with their feet’ by stopping their contribution payments?
Relevant fields/expertise: social history, economic history, financial history, legal history, history of science, history of technology
Scaling plans
This project complements “Pooling capital” by investigating concepts and paper tools that allowed administrators and investors to make decision on increasingly larger scales. It will analyse how time (and space) was organised for extraction in Central European mining. Salient forms of long-term and large-scale planning emerged in the context of resource extraction that underpinned political power, such as tax offices, chartered trading companies, and forests supplying timber for navies. As local representatives of their princes’ sovereign power, mining administrations built and maintained large technical systems of mines, adits, hammer-works, refineries, forests, lakes, canals, and granaries. As in other contexts of resource extraction, mining administrators surveyed and mapped these systems, made accounts, and kept good archives. The analysis of administrative reports can usefully be combined with the analysis of historiographical practices of the period, and astrological works that relate to mining. This project will result in a fuller history of modern sustainability by putting the focus on long-term thinking in the extraction of non-renewable resources. Which scholarly and vernacular concepts and new data practices were used to lift the temporal horizon of decision-making? Time-making practices seem to have fed into the rationality specific to Central European ‘sustainable’ mining: that even unprofitable mines should be preserved for the common good. The circulation of time-making practices across religion, astrology, history, and geology may explain why administrators argued for sustaining mining, even when this was questionable in financial terms.
Relevant fields/expertise: history of science, history of technology, environmental history, history of the humanities, history of economic thought
Reproducing labour
Labour in mines and refineries was harmful and hazardous, and governments took measures to retain workers in the mines. They offered wage guarantees, tax reductions, and exemptions from military service throughout the period, valorising mining labour in contradistinction to farming and artisanal work. Workers, in turn, defended these privileges through petition and revolt. This project asks how labour was preserved and reproduced in Central European mining, which would break new ground in two ways. First, analyzing the paper tools of administrations would establish whether the rationalisations of state administrations built on, or differed from, those of private entrepreneurs. Second, it would take a more holistic approach than is usual by embedding waged productive labour in the context of reproductive labour in households, families, and kin groups, especially that performed by women. Men worked at prominent steps in the production, such as mining and refining, while women were relegated to auxiliary and reproductive labour such as washing ores, housekeeping, home manufacture, and subsistence farming. Mining administrators sought to attract workers through colonisation and migration but also took measures to increase the local workforce through child-bearing and -rearing. In what ways, then, did mining administrations shape and reinforce gender roles? A promising avenue for tackling these questions would be to analyse relevant regulations in mining law and administrative reports. Seeing these discourses, norms, and regulations in action requires analyzing them alongside visual and material culture (including working tools) that is accessible through library, museum, and archival collection.
Relevant fields/expertise: social history, gender history, cultural history, history of science, history of technology
Managing health and pollution
Mining made soils infertile, its effluents killed fish, trees and livestock, and workers were exposed to disease and accidents. This research project seeks to establish how workers’ health and pollution was managed in Central European mining, using a two-pronged approach. It would, on the one hand, investigate medical professionals in the context of administrative concerns about preserving the labour power of mine and refinery workers. Approaching mines as a medical trading zone would establish whether administrations provided a matrix for creating, compiling, and applying work-related medical knowledge. This project would thus help explain how occupational and environmental medicine emerged from concerns about labour and health. On the other hand, it would embed the work-place for wage-earning male labourers in a context of waged and non-waged reproductive labour in urban and rural households (as “Rationalising Labour”). The household has been established as a site of medical practice and experimentation, highlighting the role of women in preserving the health of their dependants. Combining the perspectives of households and the mining administration will bring into contrast stakeholder conflicts around the pollution of the air, soil, and water. Relevant sources include administrative reports about the (lack of) safety in mines and refineries and measures planned and implemented; physicians’ expert opinions and paperwork documenting their medical practice; the papers of miners’ associations dispensing medical aid and insurance; medical treatises in print and manuscript; mining lore and material culture as it is preserved in museum and library collections.
Relevant fields/expertise: history of medicine, environmental history, gender history, history of science, history of technology