UNEARTHED: SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT ACROSS MINERAL FRONTIERS

Unearthed, my forthcoming book, is an archaeology of environmental sciences assembled through mining industries that linked central Europe to empires in the Americas and northern Eurasia. It fundamentally reframes nineteenth-century sciences of earth and air into a coherent set of interrelated practices, what this book calls geo-atmospheric sciences. And it analyzes their emergence through agencies of empire and global capitalism that progressively disadvantaged the global south and east. At the core of the book is a critical revision of the Prussian savant Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Unearthed shows Humboldt’s seemingly autonomous travels to Spanish America and Russian Siberia in the highly determined circuits of German miners who served foreign empires as “mercenaries.” While bringing earth and atmospheric sciences into a single plane of analysis, this book also crafts a new history of empire that emphasizes the role of central European agents in far-flung systems of incarceration, enslavement, dispossession, and colonization. A key argument here is that mining formed a world-infrastructure of science: an empire under empires. Unearthed shows this, crucially, before the founding of the German Colonial Empire in the 1880s, and so contributes to emerging literatures in global and European history as well as history of science, environmental history, and energy history. 

 Image Source: Plan for the new method of working the mines, by Gaspar Sabugo, 1790. AGI, MP-PERU_CHILE, 121.