Article ID: CBB056193954

Sustainable Gains: Dutch Investment and Bureaucratic Rationality in Eighteenth-Century Saxon Mines (2020)

unapi

A late-eighteenth-century encounter between Dutch merchants and cameralist Saxon officials is used to argue two related points. First, the history of knowledge can help us rethink hierarchical power structures like the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Mine owners had a right to information and could not be forced to pay contributions, which meant that mining officials were solicitous in sharing knowledge, fretted about investors’ favor, and took their desire for revenue into consideration. These observations directly challenge the traditional absolutist image of the Saxon mining bureaucracy. Second, the history of knowledge can help explain how certain rationalities (that is, combinations of means, ends, and values) came into being. Saxon officials sought to situate short-term income and expense in a success story that spanned decades and centuries. Informed by the concept of Nachhalt (sustainability), Saxon officials saw profit even in mines that lost money. This kind of sustainability thinking is best explained via the archival practices of the mining bureaucracy: officials collected information from yield sheets and local lore in order to calculate long-term outputs, to speculate about untapped deposits, and to disburse as little profit as possible. When the Dutch eventually understood this rationality, they withdrew. Saxony’s early modern mining bureaucracy was dismantled by liberal reforms in 1850s, but its peculiar brand of sustainability, aiming to extract resources at almost all costs, likely survived the dawn of industrial capitalism as young engineers and administrators became versed in it at the Freiberg Mining Academy.   This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.

...More
Included in

Article Sebastian Felten; Christine von Oertzen (2020) Bureaucracy as Knowledge. Journal for the History of Knowledge. unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB056193954/

Similar Citations

Article Sebastian Felten; (2018)
The History of Science and the History of Bureaucratic Knowledge: Saxon Mining, Circa 1770 (/isis/citation/CBB103245872/)

Article Harun Küçük; (2020)
The Bureaucratic Sense of the Forthcoming in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul (/isis/citation/CBB024194457/)

Article Sven Dupré; Geert Somsen; (2019)
The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies (/isis/citation/CBB931053546/)

Book Andreas Weber; Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis; Huib J. Zuidervaart; (2019)
Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts (/isis/citation/CBB082873915/)

Article Sebastian Felten; (2020)
Mining culture, labour, and the state in early modern Saxony (/isis/citation/CBB677637200/)

Article Dietrich Stoyan; Thomas Morel; (2018)
Julius Weisbach's Pioneering Contribution to Orthogonal Linear Regression (1840) (/isis/citation/CBB674937398/)

Book John Krige; (2019)
How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology (/isis/citation/CBB105773946/)

Article Anna Echterhölter; (2020)
Shells and Order: Questionnaires on Indigenous Law in German New Guinea (/isis/citation/CBB475810663/)

Article Theodore Porter; (2020)
Revenge of the Humdrum: Bureaucracy as Profession and as a Site of Science (/isis/citation/CBB941930472/)

Article Charly Coleman; (2019)
The Spirit of SpeculationJohn Law and Economic Theology in the Age of Lights (/isis/citation/CBB579032126/)

Article John L. Heilbron; (2019)
History of Science or History of Learning (/isis/citation/CBB138652234/)

Article Richard Staley; (2019)
Partisans and the Use of Knowledge versus Science (/isis/citation/CBB996112604/)

Authors & Contributors
Felten, Sebastian
Parak, Gisela
Wang, Sixiang
Coleman, Charly
Guido Poliwoda
Burghardt, Ivonne
Concepts
Bureaucracy
Sociology of knowledge
Mines and mining
History of knowledge
Diffusion of innovation; diffusion of knowledge; diffusion of technology
History of science, as a discipline
Time Periods
18th century
Early modern
17th century
19th century
16th century
Qing dynasty (China, 1644-1912)
Places
Saxony
Netherlands
Germany
France
China
Istanbul (Turkey)
Institutions
Dutch East India Company
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment