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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2020
Historians have recently shown how the concept of ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) first emerged through statist ambitions to enfold nature into political economy in eighteenth-century Germany. Shifting the focus from forestry to mining, this article draws upon the case of Prussian mining official Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ‘Mining School’ he founded in Bad Steben to argue that sustainable resource management also entailed the strict discipline of labour relations and a programme of ‘psychological policy’. Humboldt's Mining School sought to address administrative concerns about ‘Raubbau’ – the rash exploitation of mineral resources ‘without consideration for the future’ – by cultivating a new generation of mine foremen loyal to the state and schooled in its protocol. Ostensibly, Humboldt wished to purge the industry of ‘superstitious’ folk knowledge that undermined the state's commitment to long-term exploitation. Yet analysis of mining songs and sagas suggests a striking analogy between official and vernacular understandings of resource extraction as an ethical matter. Thus, the environmental alarms sounded by German miners around 1800 were triggered by transgressions of a social nature; and political concerns about social order in the ‘mining state’ were constitutive of material concerns about natural resources.
This article owes a tremendous debt to the careful readings of three anonymous reviewers, as to the editors at the Historical Journal. I am deeply grateful for the insight and encouragement I received from David Blackbourn, Jean-Michel Johnston, Johnathon Speed, Richard Hölzl, and Dana Beltaji while writing this article, and for the assistance of kind and knowledgeable archivists at the Bayerisches Staatsarchiv Bamberg and Bergarchiv Freiberg.
1 Humboldt, Alexander von, ‘Ganz gehorsamstes Promemoria, die Errichtung einer königlichen freien Bergschule zu Steben betreffend’, in Bruhns, Karl, ed., Alexander von Humboldt: Eine wissenschaftliche Biographie, i (Leipzig, 1872), pp. 293–4Google Scholar. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
2 Bayerisches Staatsarchiv Bamberg, preußisches Fürstentum Bayreuth, Kriegs- und Domänenkammer (StABa, KDK), no. 7114, vol. 1, p. 88; no. 7124, p. 465.
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6 Tausch, Das Bergrecht, p. 289: ‘Man nennt einen Bau Raubbau, wenn der Bau eilfertig ohne eine gewisse Ordnung und ohne Rücksicht auf dem Bestand der Grube in die Zukunft (Nachhältigkeit) getrieben.’ Sustainability has typically been studied within the context of forestry, yet miners of the period also evoked the term. See Sebastian Felten, ‘Sustainable gains: Dutch investment and bureaucratic rationality in eighteenth-century Saxon mines’, Journal for the History of Knowledge, forthcoming as part of a special issue on Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge: Global Comparisons, 1200–1900, ed. Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen. Yet it is also important to recognize, with Joachim Radkau, that ‘sustainability’ was ‘only one aspect among others’ in the contemporary language of resource management (Joachim Radkau, Wood: a history, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, 2012), p. 173).
7 Werner, Dietmar, ed., Bergmannssagen aus dem Erzgebirge (Leipzig, 1985), pp. 94–6Google Scholar; Werner, Dietmar, ed., Bergmannssagen aus dem Harz (Leipzig, 1990), p. 50Google Scholar.
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11 Note also the influential, and complementary, argument of Grove, Richard, Green imperialism: colonial expansion, tropical island Edens, and the origins of environmentalism (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar.
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15 A pioneering effort to unite labour history and environmental history, which also centres on mining, is Andrews, Thomas G., Killing for coal: America's deadliest labor war (Cambridge, MA, 2008)Google Scholar.
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17 Humboldt, ‘Promemoria’, p. 294.
18 ‘The opposite [of Raubbau] is: to build bergmännisch’ (Mineralophilo Freibergensi, Neues und Curieuses Bergwerks-Lexicon (Chemnitz, 1730), p. 504).
19 On vernacular knowledge in the history of science, see Tilley, Helen, ‘Global histories, vernacular science, and African genealogies; or, is the history of science ready for the world?’, Isis, 101 (2010), pp. 110–19CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
20 Martínez-Alier, Joan, The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and valuation (Cheltenham, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 In Rob Nixon's formulation, ‘the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one’ (Nixon, Rob, Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (Cambridge, MA, 2013), p. 17Google Scholar).
22 Asmussen, Tina, ‘Wild men in Braunschweig – economies of hope and fear in early modern mining’, Renaissance Studies, 34 (2020), pp. 31–56, at p. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Asmussen notes that Gerhard Heilfurth's compendium of mining myths – Bergbau und Bergmann in der deutschsprachigen Sagenüberlieferung Mitteleuropas (Marburg, 1967) – remains an ‘essential reference’ for historians of early modern mining.
23 Krause, Ortrud, ‘Sagenhafter Rammelsberg: Historie, Berggeister und zauberhafte Kräfte in der bergmännischen Erlebniswelt und Volksdichtung’, in Roseneck, Reinhard, ed., Der Rammelsberg: Tausend Jahre Mensch-Natur-Technik, ii (Goslar, 2001), pp. 14–33Google Scholar; Fors, Hjalmar, The limits of matter: chemistry, mining, and Enlightenment (Chicago, IL, 2015), p. 38Google Scholar.
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26 Humboldt, ‘Promemoria’, p. 293.
27 Bergius, Neues Policey- und Cameral-Magazin, p. 264.
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30 Relatedly, Laura Dassow Walls locates the origins of Humboldt's ‘proto-ecological view’ of New Spain in contemporary notions of political economy, in the broad sense of economy derived from the Greek oikonomia, that is, ‘household management’ (Walls, Laura Dassow, The passage of the cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the shaping of America (Chicago, IL, 2009), pp. 122–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
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32 Frank Holl and Eberhard Schulz-Lüpertz, eds., ‘Ich habe so große Pläne dort geschmiedet…’: Alexander von Humboldt in Franken (Gunzenhausen, 2012); Klein, Humboldts Preußen.
33 Ursula Klein, ‘Alexander von Humboldt – Vater der Umweltbewegung?’, in Achtsamer Umgang mit Ressourcen und miteinander – gestern und heute. Abhandlungen der Humboldt-Gesellschaft für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Bildung e. V., vol. 37, Manuskript des Vortrags, gehalten am 6. Mai 2016 anlässlich der 103. Tagung der Humboldt-Gesellschaft in Freiberg/Sachsen (September 2016), pp. 115–27.
34 On Humboldt's environmental concerns, particularly about wood shortages, see Weigl, Engelhard, ‘Wald und Klima: Ein Mythos aus dem 19. Jahrhundert’, HiN, 5 (2004), pp. 81–99Google Scholar; Stottmeister, Ulrich, ‘Umweltgedanken zu Alexander von Humboldt’, HiN, 18 (2017), pp. 75–94Google Scholar.
35 Anton von Heynitz as quoted in Baumgärtel, Bergbau und Absolutismus, p. 163. Humboldt himself spoke of a lack of oversight in the mines as a ‘failure of Haushalt’ (Humboldt to Untergebirgische Kammer zu Ansbach, 31 Mar. 1794, in Jahn and Lange, eds., Jugendbriefe, p. 333). This conception of the body politic as a household unit is thoroughly analysed in Roberts, Lissa, ‘Practicing oeconomy during the second half of the long eighteenth century: an introduction’, History and Technology, 30 (2014), pp. 133–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 Foremen were divided into Unter- and Obersteiger, who ranked amongst ‘common’ miners and minor administrators respectively. Foremen might also rise to the rank of Geschworner, tasked with supervising multiple mines. But even these figures were hybrid in nature: they performed administrative functions, adjudicating legal disputes for instance, but also carried out on-site mine inspections. Though Humboldt wrote specifically of training foremen, the School's records also include young ‘shift bosses’ (Schichtmeister), the rank of its first instructor, Georg Heinrich Spörl. Shift bosses ranked above, and supervised, foremen. Yet they were also administrators ‘of the Leder’.
37 Reinhold Köhler, ed., Alte Bergmannslieder (Weimar, 1858), pp. 49–50: ‘Glück auf, Glück auf! / der Steiger kommt / und er hat sein Grubenlicht – bei der Nacht – / schon angezündt’.
38 Gerhard Heilfurth, Neuvermehrtes vollständiges Bergliederbüchlein: Eine buntgemischte Singgut-Sammlung aus Mitteldeutschland um 1700 (Hildesheim, 1988), p. 102: ‘Unser Steiger muß vor allen / brechen in die Grube Bahn’.
39 Felten, ‘Mining culture’, pp. 131–3; Wolfgang Lampe, ‘Stuffen-zeichen im Harzer Bergbau’, Ausbeute: Mitteilungsblatt der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Harzer Montangeschichte, 3 (2008), pp. 26–30.
40 Johann Gottlieb Voigt, Bergwerksstaat des Ober- und Unterhaarzes (Braunschweig, 1771), p. 102.
41 Helmuth Trischler, Steiger im deutschen Bergbau: Zur Sozialgeschichte der technischen Angestellten, 1815–1945 (Munich, 1988), pp. 18–19; Felten, Sebastian, ‘The history of science and the history of bureaucratic knowledge: Saxon mining, circa 1770’, History of Science, 56 (2018), pp. 403–31, esp. pp. 421, 424CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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43 Jakob Vogel, ‘Auf dem Weg zum “Bergarbeiter”: Zur Sozialgeschichte der bergmännischen Arbeit im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, in Wolfhard Weber, ed., Geschichte des deutschen Bergbaus, ii (Münster, 2015), p. 100.
44 Hans-Joachim Kraschewski, ‘Arbeitsorganisation und Sozialstruktur im Rammelsberger Bergbau des 16. bis 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Reinhard Roseneck, ed., Der Rammelsberg: Tausend Jahre Mensch-Natur-Technik, i (Goslar, 2001), pp. 280–91, at p. 290.
45 Trischler, Steiger im deutschen Bergbau, p. 19.
46 Baumgärtel, Bergbau und Absolutismus, p. 64.
47 Hartmann, Handwörterbuch, p. 555.
48 Bergius, Neues Policey- und Cameral-Magazin, p. 264.
49 Pamela H. Smith, ‘Making as knowing: craft as natural philosophy’, in Pamela H. Smith et al., eds., Ways of making and knowing: the material culture of empirical knowledge (New York, NY, 2014), pp. 23–30.
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51 E.g. Giobert, M., ‘De la Magnésie de Baudissero en Canavais, Départment de la Doire’, Journal des Mines, 20 (1806), pp. 293–4Google Scholar.
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53 ‘Freyberg, den 6ten Januar 1830. Königlich Sächsisches Ober-Bergamt’, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Bestand Goethe 26 lxvi, 2, 85, p. 178.
54 Warde, Invention of sustainability, p. 205.
55 Hartmann, Handwörterbuch, p. 555.
56 Bergarchiv Freiberg, Sächsisches Staatsarchiv (SächsBergAFG) 40169, no. 1748, pp. 3–4.
57 As quoted in Holl and Schulz-Lüpertz, eds., Humboldt in Franken, p. 58.
58 StABa, KDK, no. 7124, p. 465.
59 This reconstruction draws upon examples of Raubbau and ‘un-minerly’ activity catalogued in SächsBergAFG 40169, no. 119, pp. 8–13; no. 1680, pp. 3–4; no. 1211, pp. 5–6; SächsBergAFG 40010, no. 3349, pp. 205–6; SächsBergAFG 40010–11, no. 3349, p. 207.
60 StABa, KDK, no. 7124, ‘Generalbefahrungsprotokolle für das Revier Lichtenberg-Lauenstein’ (unnumbered).
61 Ursula Klein notes that Humboldt believed foremen lacked authority and worked too closely with the hewers, and that these concerns bespoke greater concerns about fraud amongst foremen. Klein, ‘The Prussian mining official’, pp. 41–2.
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65 StABa, KDK, no. 7114, vol. 1. The book spans pp. 82–103; quotations are from pp. 82–3, 88.
66 Ibid., pp. 323, 324, 45.
67 Humboldt to Carl Freiesleben, 21 Jan. 1794, in Jahn and Lange, eds., Jugendbriefe, p. 312.
68 See further analysis in Holl and Schulz-Lüpertz, eds., Humboldt in Franken, pp. 62–4.
69 This was the argument of an earlier generation of cameralist literature, as in Christoph Traugott Delius, Anleitung zu der Bergbaukunst nach ihrer Theorie und Ausübung… (Vienna, 1773), p. 2.
70 Humboldt, ‘Promemoria’, p. 293.
71 Heinz Kelbert noted that Humboldt's School took after a Bergschule founded by Anton von Heynitz in Freiberg in 1776 as a subsidiary of the Mining Academy, which was founded by the same Heynitz in 1765. In Freiberg, the top eight students would be admitted into an abbreviated course of study at the Bergakademie. See Kelbert, Heinz, Das Bildungswesen auf den fiskalischen Berg- und Hüttenwerken in Preussen am Ausgang des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1955), esp. pp. 50–1, 119–30, 144–8Google Scholar.
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91 Humboldt, ‘Promemoria’, p. 296; StABa, KDK, no. 7114, vol. 1, p. 80.
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95 As quoted in Klein, ‘The Prussian mining official’, p. 42. See also Kelbert, Das Bildungswesen, p. 52.
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111 Köhler, ed., Bergmannslieder, p. 160.
112 Werner, ed., Bergmannssagen aus dem Erzgebirge, pp. 144–5.
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115 Voigt, Bergwerksstaat, pp. 103–4.
116 Michel Foucault famously described the bestowal of honour as a typical instrument of social discipline in schools and militaries. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY, 1995), p. 181.
117 Humboldt, ‘Promemoria’, p. 294.
118 Köhler, ed., Bergmannslieder, pp. 39, 84–5: ‘Die bergmännsche Weise gefallt mir sehr wol, / wenn jeder so lebt wie er billich soll, / aufrichtig, gottfürchtig und fleißig dabei, / dieß sind die bergmännischen Tugenden drei’. ‘Gott kann veredlen und aufthun / Einen Spat- und Morgen-Trum, / wie es sich wünschet ein bergmännisch Herz, / mit Glanz, weiß- und rotgülden Erz’.
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125 Humboldt to Carl Freiesleben, 14 Dec. 1795, in Jahn and Lange, eds., Jugendbriefe, p. 474.
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