Mining the Earth, Roaming the Globe

In the early modern period, the circulation of skilled labour was paramount to the development of local economies. In extractive activities such as mining, expert practitioners from high productivity enterprises designed a wide array of economic, legal, and ecological practices. These strategies imposed on and adapted to local settings at various levels. But why did highly specialized workers move to unknown working sites across the early modern world? And how did the interaction of different groups of knowers shape discourses on sustainability in the mines? This project aims to answer these questions by investigating the migration of German-speaking miners across European and Spanish colonial mines in the period 1500-1800. Existing scholarship on mining history in Central Europe has focused prominently on the role of newly discovered mineral deposits as a driving force of labour migrations to mining towns. While this research has contributed significantly to our understanding of mining activities in Saxony, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and in the Balkans, little attention has been paid to the considerable number of men and women who left highly productive mining sites for unknown ones. For instance, German-speaking miners those identified with the use of the German language or one of its dialects moved widely across the early modern world. Due to their expertise in mining and metallurgy, German miners moved in search for unexplored mineral deposits, and were hired by subcontractors and state authorities as early as the sixteenth century. This project takes the case study of the migration of German miners to explore patterns of labour mobility and the circulation of knowledge in three different mining regions: the English copper mines of Cumberland; the Spanish colonial mines in the Caribbean and Per; and the Medici silver mines in Tuscany (Italy). The project will be articulated in three steps. First, it will analyse employment contracts and forms of labour coercion across early modern European states and Iberian empires. Second, because women workers participated in local mining activities and migrated alongside husbands and mining crews, the project will shed new light on womens work and knowledge in mining activities. Finally, by examining the interactions between different knowledge productions, the project will examine how the history of local and bottom-up sustainable solutions illuminates the dependencies between natural landscapes and human bodies in the early modern world. Overall, this project will contribute to a cross-disciplinary and globally comparative understanding of natural resource extraction in the early modern period. It will use various methodological approaches from the history of science, economic and social history, labour history, and gender history to recover the work and knowledge of men and women and highlight the community-centred awareness that led to local discussion and action on sustainability.