Mining and the Formation of Modern Geology

Abstract

Mining mineral resources and knowing the Earth are historically entwined activities. This connex of practical and theoretical interest in the Earth has long been noted by historians of science. This historiographical chapter uses Vaccari and Morello’s survey as a starting point. It revisits the idea that an eighteenth-century conjuncture of mining and scholarship brought about modern geology, tracing some strands of this narrative into the period of institutional entrenchment and global diffusion in the nineteenth century. It surveys canonical and recent works in the history of geology. Section 2 situates the interaction of mining and geology in a broader debate on practical and theoretical knowledge in the Scientific and Industrial Revolution. Sections 3, 4, 5, and 6 describe four ways in which historians have found mining (including other forms of earthwork like digging canals or quarrying) to have shaped the modern earth sciences. Section 7 points to a new avenue for research about the interface between mining and science: the impact of specifically bureaucratic knowledge production on modern geology during its formation. The Conclusion asks how the interaction between mining and science was shaped, or even constituted, by social mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion based on class/status, gender, and race.