Presentation at the Workshop „Political Economies of Mining in the Early Modern World“ | ERC SCARCE (PI: Sebastian Felten) (Web) and the FWF ESPRIT project „Mining the Earth, Roamin the Globe (PI Gabriele Marcon) (Web)

Time: 25.09.2025, 14.00-15.30
Venue: C3 – Centrum für Internat. Entwicklung, Senseng. 3, 1090 Vienna

Mining is one of the earliest cases of large-scale industrial wage work. As such, it holds a central role in labour history and is often addressed from the perspectives of proletarianization, masculinization and the labour movement. Central to these perspectives is the commodification of labour in an expanding market economy. While holding relevance, such approaches carry a risk of early mining industries being studied teleologically as prototypes of industrial labour as we know it from modernity. However, large-scale mining did not emerge in modern market economies. Rather, it was an outcome of expanding early modern state apparatuses striving to control territorial resources. This paper addresses labour relations in early modern mining with this in mind. The specific industry under study is the state-owned silver mine in Sala, Sweden, which employed hundreds of wageworkers.
Through a close reading of court protocols and company records, a fine-grained analysis of the individuals involved in the production and the conditions under which they toiled is done. The findings show that wage work took a variety of forms and intersected with other types of labour. They also show that women were involved in the production in spite of being excluded from the wage work. Importantly, the study explains how these results can be understood in light of early modern state management rather than an expanding market economy.

Caroline Lindroth is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, Uppsala, Sweden.

Full Programme (25.-26.09.2025) (PDF)
Each session will be based on pre-circulated papers, and participants are expected to read the papers in advance, as there will be no formal presentations. To register and receive the pre-circulated papers, please email gabriele.marcon@univie.ac.at or claire.sabel@univie.ac.at.

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