Provided in Time: Mineral Extraction, Capitalism, and the Language of Growth in Early Modern Central Europe

Description

Presentation at the WISO Morgenkolloquium (Colloquium of the Department of Economic and Social History)

Metal was a renewable resource in early modern Europe. Analogies between vegetable, animal, and mineral growth were widespread and informed economic thinking within a providential worldview. However, the provision of metals by Nature/God was thought to occur slowly. While miners assumed abundance in the long term, they worried over scarcity in the short term. As a result, Central European mining administrators developed a form of restrained extraction that mirrored scientific forestry in being slow-paced, oriented towards a remote future, and aiming for total use of available deposits. This paper asks how "sustainable" resource extraction emerging in Central European territorial states relates to the history of capitalism. Was this the opposite of "commodity frontiers" (Jason Moore) in the Americas and essentially a non-capitalist mode of extraction? Or does it show that Central Europeans practiced their own forms of "controlled capitalism" (Philipp R. Roessner)?

Discussant: Anka Steffen (WISO)

Period	7 May 2025
Held at	Department of Economic and Social History
Degree of Recognition	International