Nature's Evil

SIX

Metals

People dig metals from under the earth and harvest fibres that grow on its surface. In processing metals, we use chemical methods which change the inner quality of every individual piece; in processing fibres we use physical operations which do not transform the individual pieces but join them together. Extracting metal from ore requires very particular conditions that are difficult to create – for example very high temperatures; in contrast, processing fibres needs protracted manual labour. A textile can be unpicked to return it to its original fibres; once an alloy has been created it cannot be separated into its original elements. Unlike the processing of fibre, which was usually women’s sphere of activity, the mining of ore and the smelting of metals were predominantly men’s work. But the historical roles and prices of these two types of commodity changed in parallel ways. Rising over the centuries, from the eighteenth century onwards prices stabilised, lagging far behind the rocketing costs of food and energy. The history of metals is full of insights, delusions and accidental discoveries, passed on to posterity by those who undertook perilous adventures and survived to tell the tale. It was a natural selection of the strange ideas promoted by people who might not have been the fittest, but who undoubtedly had luck on their side – a Darwinian process lasting 8,000 years.

Bronze

Unlike water, grain or wood, metals are topical resources, and the trade in them is all about location. If you are able to extract a resource that you have, you need to trade it for another commodity that you do not have, and transport these things both ways. These questions simply don’t arise if you have the same grain, wood or apples that your neighbours also have. You might be doing well, but you have neither trade nor capital. And probably you do not have metals.

Metal ores occur randomly, without rhyme or reason, and very inconveniently for humankind. Ores are embedded in the depths of the earth; tectonic processes only rarely push ores up to the surface in folds in the earth’s crust. These folds are usually located in the mountains – uninhabited places far from sea routes, fertile lands and trading towns. So it happened that the sources of wealth – gold fields, silver mines and, later, deposits of copper or iron ore – were found in remote places. Or, conversely, just because these deposits were few and far between they turned into sources of great wealth. Compare metals with a resource that is distributed more widely – clay. The source of bricks and pottery, clay was a godsend for humanity; the firing of clay brought greater benefits to people than any other technology. But clay never became a cult object; an evenly dispersed resource benefits people without creating inequality and does not make fortunes. The potter’s technology was often superior to the blacksmith’s; many methods of processing metals borrowed their techniques and tools from the craft of working with clay. But only metals, with their miraculous transmutations, specialised uses and monopoly sources of supply, created a society based on knowledge, inequality and growth. The era of capital coincided with the age of metal.

The Bronze Age was preceded by the long period of human history when metal, prized for its glitter and scarcity, was an object of worship. Using stone tools, people shaped metal nuggets into ritual ornaments. The Bible tells the ancient story of the golden calf: when the people fell into despair, Aaron melted down thousands of personal ornaments to make a community idol. Then Moses, ‘a stranger in a strange land’, came down from the mountain; he destroyed the golden calf and taught the Jews to worship the invisible God. The religion of the Golden Calf lingered on in the worship of gold – the universal equivalent of money and abundance. But there was also the religion of the Golden Fleece – an anticipation of wonder and adventure. The people of the mountains found metals in their barren rocks, but the people of the valleys could also obtain them in exchange for grain, wool or ceramics. Thanks to the exchange of fibres for metals, people understood the expanses of the globe as a source of treasures and a place for discoveries.

If you added black sand to a furnace, then – with luck – the alloy produced would be sturdier than ordinary copper. This alloy of copper and tin was bronze; people started making tools and weapons out of it. But in the bogs of Mesopotamia and the delta of the Nile even stone was a curiosity. Nomads from the North supplied metals to the nascent civilisations of the Middle East in exchange for artisan products from the South. But, in their search for wood and metal, people from these fertile plains migrated ever further north – to Lebanon, Anatolia and the whole Mediterranean. Egyptians extracted copper from mines in Sinai and captured gold mines in Nubia. Weapons made of metal allowed them to control the peasants who dug the earth with wooden implements. Synonymous with control over grain stores and cedar forests, power was now concerned with mines, furnaces and delivery routes.

Armed with the sword, the plough and the wheel, civilisation moved north. Smithies appeared in peasant villages. Their owners made a living by barter, not by agricultural labour, and were often considered as interlopers and magicians; many of them were migrants. Metallurgy needed men to assemble various resources – for example, copper, tin and charcoal – in one place, although they were all sourced from different areas. There were many deposits of copper ore in Europe; tin, less common, had to be brought from far away. In bronze alloys, tin made up less than a fifth by weight, but its sources were distant and limited, which meant that tin was expensive to barter. Alternatively, smiths could make bronze by smelting copper with poisonous arsenic. They died young, and although the god of blacksmithing, Hephaestus, was depicted with powerful shoulders, he was lame in both legs. But he forged weapons that were prized by the gods, and he was married to the beautiful Aphrodite.

At about the same time as people were learning to combine tin and copper, they also discovered how to separate silver. They heated ore in a hearth to the highest temperature they could achieve. Tin melted in the hearth and flowed out as if from a font or cupel, and the silver remained inside. This miraculous process was called cupellation. Athens rose thanks to the silver in the Laurion mines of Attica. The mines belonged to the state, although they were often farmed out to private individuals; nameless slaves worked the mines. From approximately 500 bce the profits from silver and tin financed the creation of a navy and the upkeep of a mercenary army. The Athenians also used this silver to maintain grain colonies in North Africa and the Mediterranean, thus avoiding the dirty work of earning their daily bread. A little later the Thracian mines in northern Greece produced even more silver; at one time they were run by Thucydides, the first historian. These mines were the source of power of the Macedonian dynasty that gave the world Alexander, the conqueror of Asia. The Phoenicians worked even richer mines in Spain. Hannibal financed his expeditions from these mines; indeed, behind every military leader there was a silver or copper mine. From his mines near Cadiz, Sextus Marius supplied Rome with both metals; as we remember (see Introduction), Tiberius accused him of incest and threw him off a rock.

The Roman Empire grew like an amoeba, spreading its tentacles now in one direction, now in another. According to the anthropologist Jack Goody, the main motive behind these advances was the quest for metals. 1 The goals of Roman colonisation were copper in southern Italy, tin in England, silver in Spain, and lead in Attica and Sardinia. The Romans loved soft, malleable lead and used it for plumbing and baths and as vessels for soft drinks. Lead salts dissolve in water, and this solution is sweet but poisonous. Lead acetate causes organ failure, and small doses cause brain damage in children. According to one study, more Roman emperors died of lead poisoning than died by the sword. 2

Smelting furnaces, sunk in the earth and faced with bricks, appeared in different parts of the world – in Western Europe, South-East Asia, northern China. The quality of the metal depended on the temperature in the furnace, which in turn depended on the up-draught, which depended on the height of the chimney, which depended on the quality of the brick. Progress in smelting was advanced by a breakthrough in firing clay. Smelting furnaces with chimneys 4 metres high were the ultimate in the art of engineering in the Bronze Age. Such furnaces were ready for smelting iron.

A noble metal that did not rust, bronze had its limits: a short sword could be made out of bronze, but not a long sabre. Bronze shields and armour offered little protection against the crude but heavy weapons of the barbarians. For making ploughs, bronze was too expensive and also prone to wear and tear. The extended delivery routes for tin were the weak spot in the production of bronze. With time, the invasion by the ‘people from the sea’ – the barbarian tribes from Eastern Europe who used iron – destroyed the ancient supply routes for tin. Relying on rare and remote resources, the Bronze Age was a time of social inequality. The owners of pits and mines became rich, but even they depended on those who controlled the delivery routes. 3

Iron

People found nuggets of pure iron in meteorites; they were rarer and more precious than gold. In the mountains accessible to the people of the ancient world – in Anatolia, the Appenines, later in the Balkans and the Carpathians – there were outcrops of iron ore. These were extracted from quarries, but iron ore appears on the earth’s surface as rarely as a meteorite. Most ancient iron was found in bogs and lakes. This type of ore is now called limonite, mudstones or simply bog iron. Historians tend to underestimate its significance.

Bog iron comes in the form of unprepossessing, rough stone nuggets of a distinctive colour, ranging from brown to yellow. They consist of ferric oxide and various admixtures; for modern metallurgy they are worthless, but they have some special qualities. Progress in the art of smelting was dictated by the use of ever higher temperatures. Different metals have different smelting temperatures; the smelting temperature of iron (for modern processes, it is higher than 1,500º Celsius) is much higher than for copper (1,000º Celsius). But iron from bog ore smelts at an unusually low temperature, starting at 400º Celsius. This temperature could be reached even by burning peat from that same bog; using good wood or, better still, charcoal, an experienced blacksmith could produce high-quality iron from bog ore. Repeated forging in a furnace removed oxygen and chemical impurities. Moreover, bog ore contained a lot of silicon. This made the iron stainless, a result that the blacksmiths of the mountains were unable to achieve for centuries.

The Iron Age staggered into being after a series of false starts. The switch of the resource platform happened about 1200 bce , when the ‘people from the sea’ arrived from beyond the Balkans to destroy and plunder the ancient centres of civilisation. The invaders were armed with iron weapons, and this metal enabled their feats as seafarers. In Anatolia, the previously unknown Hittites founded a powerful state, which was based on iron; it competed with Egypt, the leading power of the Bronze Age. The Hittites forged swords and axes from iron and made iron parts for their chariots too. They ousted the Egyptians from the Levant and Canaan, but then the Hittite state also collapsed, unable to withstand the onslaught of the Phrygian cavalry who had attacked from the North. This was the era when massed infantry, armed with iron sabres and helmets, gained victory over chariots from which high-born warriors fired arrows and wielded lances – a period of global destruction of the old priestly elites. The barbarian peoples – the Etruscans, the Phoenicians and the Celts – were great masters of iron and used it for making ploughs, horseshoes, nails and cheap weapons for the infantry. For the Romans, iron was a despised metal, but they learnt from their enemies.

In ancient Israel, the tribe of Yahweh cleared the land with iron axes, mattocks and ploughs. In the first temple of King Solomon, started in 950 bce , both copper and iron were used. The invention of the iron plough was a major factor in the productivity of agriculture. The wheels for war chariots, carriages and wheelbarrows needed iron parts. Then ploughs were also put on wheels; combining wood and iron, these implements enabled the mass use of draught animals. Only Eurasia used the plough; before the arrival of settlers the plough was unknown in America, Africa or Oceania. Experiments by anthropologists have shown that you can chop down a tree with a bronze axe three times faster than with a stone axe and eight times faster with an iron axe. Increasing the area of arable land and making the competition for land more intense, iron tools strengthened social stratification and the role of the state. From now on, property rights would define life and wealth, and only the state could protect these rights.

But the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe characterised the Iron Age as a time of democracy and monotheism. The use of iron weapons enabled the overthrow of the priestly elites; exchanging iron tools for farm products improved the life of the peasants. As it happened, the change of the resource platform was defined by the technical progress that had created a cheaper and abundant alternative. Throughout the civilised world, from India to Spain, the transition from bronze to iron was accompanied by the destruction of towns, the growth of violence and the decline of written culture. The magnificent palaces and trading towns of the Middle East disappeared. Archaeologists detect signs of the catastrophe in the deterioration of pottery and in the mass migration from coastal areas to the hilltops where cattle herders could protect themselves from pirates. It was a Time of Troubles; centuries passed before the peoples of Greece and Palestine could find new paths of cultural development. Then the Axial Age began, with its mass religion, written law and metal coins. 4

The success of the Hittites and the ‘people from the sea’ demonstrated that their iron weapons were at least as good as bronze ones, and probably cheaper. But the early methods of processing iron are still a mystery. The temperature at which mined iron melts has not changed to this day; it is impossible to achieve it in a furnace fuelled by wood. According to one theory, the ‘people from the sea’ used bog iron, which they brought from the Scythian steppes further to the north; using charcoal to heat the furnace, they were able to forge blades from this ore. Another theory claims that the Hittites forged weapons using ore with a high nickel content, which produced something like a steel alloy; in Anatolia there are deposits of this ore. According to a third hypothesis, the Hittites combined the carburisation of metal with its ‘tempering’. 5 Burning crushed iron ore with a large quantity of charcoal, they rapidly quenched the alloy in cold water. The alloy crystallises into a sturdy, malleable material, discovered anew by the German engineer Adolph Martens in 1902; this material was named Martensite.

The mysterious Hittites did not pass on their secret to descendants. The later armourers alternated folded layers of forged iron and tempered steel – the resulting sandwiches were lighter and sharper. Metallurgy is an art. The physical changes that occur in fibres are simpler and more predictable than the chemical reactions produced when various substances are heated and combined, such as oxidation, carburation or cupellation. Acquired through millennia of trial and error, empirical knowledge was secret. Every generation of miners and smiths had to learn their trade: starting his apprenticeship as a child, the pupil found himself completely under the power of his master. A rare and profitable profession passed down from father to son; childless blacksmiths (and there were many) easily found apprentices.

In peacetime, Rome depended more on brick and wood than on metal. But every Roman legion used hundreds of tons of iron for defensive and attack weapons. The further the borders of this empire stretched in the search for metal, the more arms, forts and metal it needed. The Roman mines were worked by slaves; many of them, however, were paid for their work and some became masters or managers. The smelting and forging depended on firewood, and the advantage of the north was evident. Mines in the Alps produced iron with a high manganese content; something akin to steel was forged from this ore, although the temperature wasn’t high enough for casting. In their battles with the Roman legions, the barbarians used long, masterfully forged iron swords. Visigoths and Vikings made excellent weapons, strengthening bog iron with magical practices harking back to the cult of the dead. Throughout Scandinavia, archaeologists have dug up forges in which they find the bones of humans and large animals such as elk and bear. With faith in their magic powers, blacksmiths forged bog iron with powdered bones to make sturdy swords. Experiments have shown that, with a limited supply of oxygen, bone meal carburises iron, creating a coating of sturdy, stainless steel.

In the China of the Han period, both the mining and forging industries developed with extraordinary speed. In northern China, people started using coal very early, which allowed them to create extremely high temperatures. In around 1000 ce , Chinese blacksmiths were making refined weaponry, coins and ornaments from bronze and iron. Forges used waterwheels which powered bellows and hammers. The Chinese rulers decreed a monopoly on mining. Copper, iron and salt became the property of the state. But something always went wrong, and these decrees had to be reissued time and again. Iron was used for the forging of swords, shields and lances, the making of ploughs, and the construction of bridges and sluice gates. The Chinese used iron to make statues of the Buddha and the roofs of pagodas. They added the blood of sacrificed animals – sheep or buffalo – to the smelted metal. The abundance of implements helped agriculture to thrive; peasants adopted intensive methods, ploughing up new lands and digging irrigation channels. Nowhere else in the world was there such a flourishing of industry up until the Industrial Revolution. The extraction and smelting industries were concentrated in several centres in northern China, close to the mines. Thousands of workers were employed in one such centre; towns with populations of about a million each grew up around the mines. In the middle of the tenth century, Chinese mines and forges extracted and smelted more iron than at the beginning of the twentieth century. 6

This early industrialisation came to a dramatic end: the iron industry of northern China completely disappeared. At the end of the Song dynasty the government was disillusioned: the Confucian state acknowledged the social problems caused by mono-resource development. The owners of pits and mines became richer than princes. According to documents from the beginning of the eleventh century, government inspectors found that the mines led to moral decay. This ‘moral decay’ was very close to the contemporary sense of ‘corruption’. Workers suffered injuries; accidents were frequent. Worst of all, the mines led to the destruction of the state: at first the entrepreneurs paid bribes to the bureaucrats, then the bureaucrats tried to seize the mines from their clients. Probably this was the first time that a technical civilisation encountered the resource curse. In 1078, a decree from the emperor forbade the extraction of metals, blaming the mines for all the woes of the empire. The decree was ignored, but the Song state was also doomed. The Mongol invasion brought hunger, floods and epidemics. Dams and roads were destroyed, trade stopped, and the survivors reverted to subsistence farming. The Mongols introduced paper money, but they still needed sabres and lances; however, the mass use of iron implements ceased. Over three centuries the population of these lands fell by a factor of ten. From the eleventh century until the beginning of the Second World War, the mines of northern China produced no iron. Although the Silk Road already connected China to Europe, the secrets of Chinese metallurgy did not travel along that route. The technology of smelting metal heated by coal would only be reinvented in England in the eighteenth century.

But the borders of the European world were widening thanks to the quest for ore. The exchange included increasingly remote lands – England, which was rich in tin, the Caucasus with its copper deposits, the Alps with their silver and copper, the Carpathians with their forests and metals. The curators who conducted the trade in metals belonged to various ethnic communities: at first they were Phoenician, then Armenian and Jewish, and later Venetian and German merchants. Europe exchanged its metals for ‘Eastern luxuries’ – sweets, spices and textiles, brought by Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch ships. The first such centre of exchange was Venice; supplied by the mining industry in Central Europe, it developed in new ways which did not depend on the Roman traditions. New industrial centres were set up on the frontiers of the German and Slav worlds – in Bohemia, Saxony, Styria and the Tyrol. Disappointed by the revenue from their peasants, local landowners put their faith in the depth of mines and the heat of furnaces. At German princely courts, alchemy and the science of minerals were held in high regard. From Munich to St Petersburg, cabinets of curiosities displayed local ores and crystals jumbled up with exotic finds from the colonies (whalebone, a shaman’s tambourine, the horn of a rhinoceros), the corpses of newborn freaks and sculptures carved from sugar.

Fugger

The most successful entrepreneur of the mining Renaissance was Jakob Fugger – as his recent biography attests, he was the richest man who ever lived. 7 Fugger was born in 1459 in Augsburg, the textile centre of southern Germany. The most important route of medieval Europe, from Danzig to Venice, ran through Augsburg. Blending local linen with Egyptian cotton, the Fugger family distributed orders to local spinners and then sold fustian at fairs in Cologne and Frankfurt. They competed with dozens of other fibre curators, but Jakob was lucky: his family business had a branch in Venice, and he was sent there as an apprentice.

Venice was the commercial centre of the world. Silk, pepper and cotton from the East were traded there for French wine, German steel, Russian fur, Italian wheat and Venetian salt. Splendid palaces began as warehouses which stored goods for long-distance trade. The banks stored silver and circulated promissory notes for trade. With his newly acquired experience, the young Fugger changed business. Using family funds, Fugger bought a silver mine in Schwaz in the Austrian Alps. A silver boom had begun there in 1409, and Schwaz was booming. Taverns and churches sprang up on the land as mineshafts were sunk into it. Until the opening of the Mexican mines, it was the biggest known deposit of silver in the world – a super-profitable monopoly.

We know about the conditions of mining in those times thanks to the works of Georgius Agricola – a Saxon doctor and alchemist. In his metallurgical recipes, published at the dawn of the age of printing, ore was repeatedly heated and cooled, crushed and washed. The alchemists of his circle discovered the phenomenon of liquation: when an alloy is cooled, different metals crystallise at different times, which separates them from one another. They also discovered catalysis: the addition of mercury helped to separate copper. A scholar of mining craft, Agricola had no understanding of the chemical processes which took place in the furnace and the forge. He compared veins of ore with the veins of the human body; just as blood collects in the arteries, the power of the earth collects metal. Agricola’s language remained the language of alchemy, which compared the processes which occurred in metals to the phenomena of body and soul. Fire purifies metals just as faith purifies the spirit. But Agricola knew how to build waterwheels, how to pump the mines, how to get ore to the surface. He could tell by the colour when metal had reached forging temperature and how many times it had to be smelted and forged to hammer out the impurities. His stories were a rich mix of Nordic paganism and frivolous Latin imagination. Agricola classified the demons living in the mines: goblins do harm, but gnomes surreptitiously help miners. Pure essences exist in mixtures but can be separated from one another and, moreover, dream of nothing but this separation. * Olaus Magnus, the author of the first history of the northern lands, published in Rome in 1555 (he was the brother of the last Catholic archbishop of Sweden), claimed that the peoples of the North had a special relationship with trolls. With or without their help, medicine and metallurgy, two fields of natural magic, spread from the south of Europe to the north. 8

Alchemists wished to turn copper or lead into gold. But only the financiers did what the alchemists promised – they turned lowly substances into jingling coins. The Tyrol belonged to Duke Sigmund, a Habsburg. People said that he had fifty children and was short of silver. A group of bankers financed him by issuing credit notes, which were calculated in pounds of future silver, with a discount. Fugger joined this group; he would receive from Sigmund a pound of silver for 8 florins of debt, and then sell it in Venice for 12 florins. Then the Tyrol lost the war with Venice and had to pay reparations. Fugger collected this sum on behalf of Sigmund after demanding full control over the mines of Schwaz. When the Tyrol was handed over to Maximilian, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the mines remained with Fugger. The capital of his empire was Arnoldstein, a woody estate halfway between Vienna and Venice. Fugger mined copper there and built furnaces to process ores from all over the Alps and the Carpathians. The Saxon engineer Johann Turtzo built pumps powered by waterwheels, which were adopted there for the first time. The sovereigns of Europe learnt the first lessons of the political economy of resources: the fate of states was decided not on the fields of battle but in scary mines and quiet offices. Mercenaries fought their battles, and sovereigns were even more dependent on their creditors in times of war than in times of peace. And the creditors, in turn, depended on the mines.

The collaboration between the bellicose Maximilian and the thrifty Fugger continued for decades. In 1515 Maximilian arranged the marriages of two of his heirs, a grandson and a granddaughter, to the offspring of Vladislaus II, the king of Hungary and Bohemia. Western and Eastern Europe were to enter into a dynastic marriage, uniting two great royal lines, the Habsburgs and the Jagiellonians. A double wedding of unbelievable luxury was planned. Albrecht Dürer designed a triumphal arch for the occasion; it was exactly like a Roman arch, but made out of wood covered in paper, printed with drawings. The arch was never made, and Dürer was not paid for his three years’ work. Maximilian again put himself in debt to Fugger, against the security of mines in Hungary. Smelted from Fugger’s copper, bronze was forged into cannons and muskets; without them, the Turks would have occupied Vienna. To separate silver from copper in the process known as liquation, lead was needed. It was found near Krakow – this was globalisation in action. The silver mines in the Alps created Fugger’s wealth, and the copper mines in the Carpathians magnified it.

After Columbus’s return from America, the two most powerful empires of that period, the Spanish and the Portuguese, agreed to divide the world into two spheres of influence. To avoid coming to blows, they drew a vertical line on a map of the Atlantic, which was at that time blank. This line skirted the coast of Brazil: all future discoveries to the west of this line would belong to Castile – to the east, to Portugal. Authorised by the pope, this line became known as the Tordesillas meridian. In 1498 Vasco da Gama skirted Africa; on the island of Angediva, off the west coast of India, he met a Polish Jew who had travelled there by the Silk Road from Poznań. He took this man to Lisbon; there he was baptised and given the name Gaspar da Gama. Manuel I, the king of Portugal, later appointed Gaspar as a counsellor. He was part of the expedition that discovered Brazil, and he discussed the layout of the world with Amerigo Vespucci. The Portuguese became pioneers of the spice trade. Fugger also had his finger in this pie: in 1504 he bought from King Manuel the right to build a pepper-processing factory in Lisbon, supplying a thousand tons of copper per year in exchange. From these operations with Portuguese merchants, Fugger made a profit of almost 200 per cent per annum. His agents organised the first circumnavigation of the globe, led by Magellan in 1519. Magellan was killed by natives in the Philippines, but his crew sailed round Africa and returned to Spain. On the way they put the Moluccas – a small archipelago of islands lying between Australia, Indonesia and New Guinea – on the map. The priceless spices of Eastern trade – nutmeg and cloves – only grew there.

All this time the Nuremburg master Martin Behaim was making globes for the Portuguese king, while the Portuguese cartographer Diogo Ribeiro was drawing maps for the Spanish king. After the return of Magellan’s expedition, the Tordesillas meridian was extended on the other side of Behaim’s globe; it became the new ‘Zaragoza antimeridian’. It turned out that the Molucca archipelago remained with Portugal. But Diogo Ribeiro continued to work for the Spanish king. At the Zaragoza peace talks, he slightly amended his map so that the Moluccas passed to Spain. 9 The skills of these experts, who were hardly paid for their work, would decide the fate of unbelievable treasures. Both Ribeiro’s map and Behaim’s globe feature in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors ; together with a Turkish carpet, a book of Lutheran hymns and a bronze astrolabe, they form the background to a world in conflict. In the foreground two imposing ambassadors from the new superpowers – France and England – are discussing this new carving up of the world. On the floor lies a spectacular skull.

Luther

Mines could collapse, flood, explode or give off poisonous gases; it was impossible to rescue the victims of such disasters. Even a soldier on the battlefield could count on more help from those who had sent him out there. The years of working in the mines inculcated a spirit of rationality, an ability to calculate risks and common-sense solidarity. An ordinary miner earned a third more than a peasant, which meant that his wife didn’t have to work in the fields but took care of the house and children. The miners were the first workers to defend their group rights. Their guilds in the Alps were unusually powerful; by the end of the fifteenth century they were already influencing pay rates, supporting the widows of miners and negotiating the length of holidays. More than once, miners’ guilds called strikes, and sometimes their leaders were arrested.

Success in mining promised career progress or even the prospect of starting your own business. The father of Martin Luther was a Saxon miner who became a furnace foreman and, towards the end of his life, the owner of a copper mine. 10 Martin grew up in the little town of Mansfeld, among mines, furnaces, chopped-down forests and smoke-blackened fields. Since the thirteenth century silver had been mined there, but by the time of Luther’s father it was a copper-smelting town, responsible for up to a quarter of all European production. The bankers of the southern princely states invested in Mansfeld, and Fugger also took an interest. There were about a hundred smelting furnaces in the town, and they were run by masters – this was a respected and well-paid job. Hans Luther ran seven furnaces with 200 workers. The miners were mostly migrants and foreigners, many of them from Bohemia. They were able to stand up for their own interests and wrote collective petitions that are still in the archives. In 1511 the Mansfeld miners formed a professional fraternity.

Copper gave excellent rents to the local landowners; during Luther’s time, three of them built castles round Mansfeld. But they were always in conflict: subterranean property rights were difficult to demarcate. After work the miners drank; alcohol relaxed tension and the town was full of taverns and brothels. Many miners had serious diseases of the lungs, stomach and skin. But Martin Luther preserved a fondness for Mansfeld and a sympathy for its problems. Thanks to his father’s income, he was able to study at university and become first a lawyer and then a monk. Giving his blessing to the investors and even the money-lenders, Luther wrote pamphlets against Fugger, the monopolist who had got rich at the expense of the miners’ toil. The miners, Luther’s local admirers, went on strike and occupied the mines. But Fugger was a harsh manager, and it was thought that his men killed some of the protesters. He insisted on having Luther arrested and handed over to the ecclesiastical court. Fugger’s money was behind the imperial Diet of Worms, which found Luther guilty of heresy. After this event, the emperor Charles V handed over control of all book printing in the empire to Fugger. By the end of his life Martin Luther’s father was in debt and had sold his business. His sons inherited land and houses but the creditors kept the mines. The number of working mines and furnaces decreased in Mansfeld; people were leaving the town, and new conflicts broke out among the mine-owners. In January 1546, Luther set off to settle a dispute between the five dukes of Mansfeld; discontented with their falling income, they had personally taken up the management of the mines. Luther persuaded Count Albrecht, one of his supporters, to make peace with his brothers so that they would hand over the management of the mines to an expert. Albrecht failed, and Luther decided that he must take on the task himself. He travelled to the neighbouring city of Eisleben, met the dukes and the miners, and listened to their grievances; it was while occupied with these matters that he died. Martin Luther shook the world with the Reformation but he died while mediating in a mining conflict.

By the 1560s the industry of Mansfeld had come to a complete stop. The silver and copper it produced could not compete with the metals brought from the New World. Neither Luther nor the dukes nor the miners could have imagined such an outcome; the boom and bust that they lived through were unthinkable in a feudal, essentially peasant culture. Complicated and tragic, life needed a new interpretation. It was precisely these conditions that gave rise to the religious doctrine which would change the life of Christians. Luther didn’t believe in portents or prejudices. But the idea of an omnipotent God whose will must be obeyed, even though it couldn’t be understood, dominated his refined imagination as much as it directed his fellow countrymen who descended into the mines every day. Acknowledging evil and believing in the power of good deeds were central parts of this faith.

Having secured a monopoly on silver, Fugger set his sights on gaining a monopoly on copper. To get the better of his few competitors in the Carpathians, he resorted to dumping. By saturating the Venetian market with copper, he was able to lower the price enough to force his rivals to declare bankruptcy, and their mines fell into Fugger’s hands. Another enemy was the Hanseatic League – it intercepted Fugger’s ships as they transported copper through Lübeck. But the might of the Hanseatic League was on the wane. In 1494 the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan III, had put a stop to its monopoly on trade in Novgorod, and a hundred years later Elizabeth I would follow his example in London. The traditional herring catch in Bergen was exhausted. Sweden, a rising star of imperial rivalry, was supporting the Dutch in the Baltic Sea. For his part, Fugger paid lavish sums to Danzig and Lübeck to deter them from supporting the monopoly rights of the Hansa. History was once again on Fugger’s side: in the sixteenth century the Hansa ceased to exist.

The Hansa had been the most powerful trade organisation of the Middle Ages. Trading in the Baltic and the North Sea, from London to Novgorod, the league had dozens of bases and warehouses, hundreds of armed ships, thousands of skilled workers. The Hansa’s strategy was diversification – herring in Bergen, fur in Novgorod, timber in Riga, grain in Danzig. With Fugger, monopoly on metals merged with monopoly of power. Charles V united the Spanish and the Holy Roman empires, and Fugger extended credit to him. In response, Charles gave him mercury mines in Spain. This mercury was used to purify silver in Potosí. Once he possessed mercury, Fugger had the whip hand over American and European silver.

The art of the financier consists in manipulating the future. In 1514 Fugger, in collaboration with Leo X, a son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, hatched a new financial scheme. It had long been a custom that the church would pardon sins in exchange for donations; now, this procedure was securitised. The sinner paid in silver and received a piece of paper stating the number of days that his soul would have to spend in purgatory. The indulgence was a security denominated in dark purgatory years: the more the sinner paid, the shorter would be his sufferings. Remarkably, the market in indulgences appeared in Europe before other securities, and even before paper money. Because it would happen in the future, salvation could be purchased at a discount in the same way as Fugger purchased metals that had not yet been extracted. The first indulgences were sold in Annaberg, a mining town near the Czech border. Then this profitable business spread throughout the German lands and the whole of Catholic Europe. Leo X announced that the profits from indulgences would be spent on building St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In fact, this money was divided between the pope and Fugger. The merging of these two monopolies, on salvation and on silver, was a decisive step towards full monotheism. Thanks to indulgences, the Golden Calf miraculously merged with the wooden cross.

Fugger had his own social policies. In the suburbs of Augsburg he built the Fuggerei, an innovative social housing complex; it consisted of more than a hundred houses, built according to a standard plan and let for a peppercorn rent. His best workers, trusted people, veterans of labour, lived there. These low-rise apartment blocks exist to this day; people live in them and visitors are taken on guided tours where they hear that this social housing was the sign of progress. But Fugger could not atone for his sins in this way. Indulgences provoked furious rebukes from Luther’s followers; this was a crucial moment in the rise of the Reformation. In revolts of 1524, weavers, miners and farmers combined into a revolutionary movement that entered the history books as the Great Peasants’ War. In his Dialogues , the ideological leader of the uprising, the knight and poet Ulrich von Hutten, accused Fugger of creating ‘mercantile monopolies’, which robbed the miners, undermined the peasants and supported Rome. The biggest uprising experienced in Europe before the French Revolution, this Peasants’ War caused hundreds of thousands of casualties. Fugger paid mercenaries to fight against the people and armed his troops with cannons made from his own copper. The uprising was quashed – miners and weavers were no match for artillery. The leaders were tortured and executed, and the fields ran with blood. The Protestants loathed Fugger, seeing him as the incarnation of evil. In their minds, the resource economy as implemented by Fugger – mines, mercenaries, venal bureaucrats and priests, social housing for the chosen few, and monstrous indulgences – all blended into the kingdom of the Antichrist.

America

When the Spanish captured native towns in the New World, they did find gold. The natives had forged nuggets and accumulated sacred pieces of metal for centuries. The continent was engulfed by gold fever. Somewhere to the south of the isthmus between the Americas lay the fabled Eldorado. In 1545 a native climbed a mountain peak in the Inca capital of Cusco in order to plunder an ancient tomb. This was how the silver deposit of Potosí was discovered; nowhere else in the world was silver so near the surface. The Spanish sent hordes of ‘Indians’ there, and soon Potosí was bigger than Seville. As in the Alps, smelting furnaces and waterwheels were established next to the mines. The natives carried supplies – timber, firewood, food, lead and mercury – up steps carved into the rockface. Supplying the world with silver, Potosí was the source of untold riches; but this town was nothing like Eldorado. To the inevitable smoke, dirt and slag heaps of a mining town was added the discipline of a military base. But Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, gave Potosí a coat of arms on which was inscribed ‘Treasure of the world, king of all mountains and the envy of all kings’. 11

Back home in the Pyrenees, the Spanish had been working mines since Roman times, but using their skills in the Andes was not easy. They brought German masters to drain the bogs around Potosí and dig canals and reservoirs. More than a hundred watermills stood on two dozen dams, crushing ore; one dam burst in 1624 and hundreds of people perished. Natives worked down the mines, but black slaves were also brought there; the daily norm for each miner was to raise half a ton of ore. There were so few Spaniards there that the ‘Indians’ did almost everything – dragged loads, went down the mines and stoked the furnaces. So experts and managers who had mastered the secrets of metal emerged from the native population. The division of labour along ethnic lines, usual for raw materials economies, recurred in the division of property rights. The Spanish owned the mines in Potosí, while Native Americans owned the furnaces. The alchemical methods of metallurgy such as cupellation and liquation easily combined with the indigenous culture. In the same way as the Alpine magicians used folk magic to master the smelting of ores, the Native American metallurgists learnt this art with the help of their shamanic traditions. The natives underwent the typical process of class stratification: the furnace owners and master smelters got rich even quicker than the Spanish, but the workers died out or ran away from Potosí. The viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, introduced the system of mita : all districts of Peru had to send their indigenous people for compulsory service in the mines. As the mines got deeper, the expenses grew, productivity fell, and the shortage of manpower became even more acute. Then a German chemist who had studied in Italy invented a new method of processing ore. Realising the alchemists’ ideas, he mixed pulverised ore with mercury in a salt solution. The silver formed an amalgam with mercury, the mercury was driven off by evaporation, and pure silver remained at the bottom of the vessel. In the old Spanish mines of Rio Tinto, the German used his method to extract silver even from slag heaps. In Potosí, many old mines got a second wind. Having created enormous wealth with his discovery, this chemist failed to get rich, and even his real name remains unknown: he enters into history only as Maestro Lorenzo. Thanks to him, the production of silver in Spanish America in 1550 equalled that of Europe and continued to grow. Mines in the German and Austrian lands were closing. The guilds were powerless to stop this process; ironically, they could only make the European mines even less competitive.

In America, the new method was given the innocent-sounding name of the ‘patio process’. The natives poured mercury into stone baths filled with brine and crushed ore, then churned this poisonous concoction with their bare hands; later this deadly task was assigned to tethered mules. One and a half kilos of mercury were needed to produce a kilo of silver. Since mercury was thought to be unavailable in America, it was brought from Spain. As it happened, the mercury mines of Almadén were owned by Fugger. Emperor Charles V declared a monopoly on mercury, adding to Fugger’s profits. However, mercury deposits were later found not far from Potosí; again, the Spanish owed this discovery to the Native Americans who used mercury dyes in their textiles. 12

At the end of the sixteenth century, the Spanish colonies were supplying silver and gold to the whole of Europe. Trading in precious metals extracted and processed by Native Americans, Philip II united the Spanish and Portuguese possessions to become the most powerful monarch in Europe. He had colonies on four continents; the Philippines were named in his honour, the sun never set on his empire. Pirates robbed individual ships but did not dare attack the majestic convoys which twice a year delivered American silver to Castile. When metal reached Seville, the crown imposed duties. It had to pay for the upkeep of the Spanish army in the Dutch provinces. It was building a great Armada, intended to conquer the globe. It financed expeditions in search of new revenues. It created a tobacco industry to stimulate internal consumption. As a result, bread, wool, labour, and almost everything else rose in price throughout Europe: this was one of the longest periods of inflation in history. The influx of silver did not stop at creating monopolies. Predominating in the exchange, a mono-resource becomes money. People have to earn more and more of this money to buy less and less.

Spanish diversification wasn’t at all effective. First, seventeen Dutch provinces – the most profitable part of the empire – revolted; then the English defeated the mighty Armada; and all this time the purchasing power of silver in Europe kept falling. In 1642 an imperial decree banned slavery. This led to a disastrous increase in expenditure. Supporting the mine-owners, far-off Seville made concessions, reducing its share of profits. But the mines were exhausted, profits fell, and the workers were dying or fleeing. Spanish extravagance and inertia were known throughout Europe. The crown was supported by raw materials – silver, wool and cod – but the lower orders had to live off subsistence farming. The metropolitan cities and the ports kept growing, and everything else was doomed to stagnation. Having seized a mountain of silver, the empire was now going to ruin. During the reign of Philip II, Spain defaulted on its debts five times and debased its currency: Spanish coins contained less and less silver. The Habsburg crisis led to a slump throughout Europe. In Russia, the succession crisis led to a civil war, Polish–Swedish intervention and decades of chaos – the Time of Troubles. The Thirty Years’ War ended with the taking of Prague by Swedish troops. The war devastated the German states; the losses – a third of the population – were comparable to the effects of the plague, remembered from the Middle Ages. The centre of European gravity was shifting north. The climate cooled, the Dutch canals froze, the English harvest failed and bread riots began. Not receiving any revenue, sovereigns raised duties, debased coins, and sold positions in the judiciary. Failing to meet their commitments, and unable to secure the common good, absolutist states turned into institutional parasites. 13

By the end of the seventeenth century the situation had improved. Gold from Brazil and new banking instruments, such as promissory notes, helped financial transactions. The first economic studies appeared – attempts to fathom the mysterious movements of raw materials, money and goods – and with them the projects of central banks in Scotland, England and France. Maritime trade moved from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and the North Sea. The economy of the Dutch Republic and her dependant, Sweden, were the drivers of growth. Stockholm became the new centre for magi and metallurgists, many of them trained by Italians or Bohemians. In 1627 the Dutch entrepreneur Louis De Geer moved to Sweden from Liège, which had been destroyed by the Spanish. Granted a concession by King Gustavus Adolphus, he smelted bronze but soon switched to iron and cannons. Under Dutch management the Swedish mines turned into suppliers of metal for the whole of Europe, including England; in the course of a century, iron smelting in Sweden increased by a factor of five. The old centres of primary commodities – Venice and Seville – went into a slump from which they would not recover.

The Little Ice Age (1500–1850) was the opposite of today’s global warming. The latest explanation for this long-drawn-out cooling is the extinction of the indigenous populations in both Americas. Epidemics and wars brought about by the white incomers led to the death of more than 50 million people, whose traditional agriculture and hunting, based on the burning of forests, ceased. When the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fell, cooling began throughout the northern hemisphere. 14 Harvest failures contributed to the European crisis; wars, uprisings and massacres erupted all over the continent, from England to Ukraine. The genocide in the Americas over the centuries was motivated by the thirst for gold or, failing that, silver. The change in climate was not a cyclical phenomenon: it was brought about by political will. The Spanish Empire created vast quantities of silver and destroyed a huge number of people; silver and wool gave birth to this empire and drained it to the last drop. Behind every sort of raw material stood the people who extracted it and the laws regulating their work. But everything began with nature – with the ore-bearing rocks of the Andes, the shoals of fish in the North Atlantic or the stretches of pastureland in Castile – and came to an end as a result of human actions. It is easy to imagine the resource economy as a man-made construct: people created it, to their advantage or detriment, in their routine appropriation of raw materials. But all these events and policies must also be looked at from the point of view of the ore, sheep, fish and weather – significant players in history, its autonomous agents.

Alchemy

Paracelsus, the father of modern medicine and a contemporary of Luther and Fugger, writes in detail about spirits. Their life is similar to human lives: spirits eat, drink, have sex with one another, and even marry, but they don’t have souls. Spirits of the mine can pass through a solid rock mass, like a person moving through the air. Sometimes they come to an agreement with a human being, seduce him or take him into service. Kobolds, also known as mine fairies, are harmless; the metal cobalt is even named after them. Gnomes can be useful, although they are cunning and treacherous; trolls are dangerous. In the German Alps, gnomes were represented as little old men equipped with beards and tails. In Sweden, mine spirits were most often described as alluring women. The Swedish geologist and alchemist Urban Hjärne participated in a witch trial in 1676. An official of the Royal Bureau of Mines, he was a renowned scholar with international connections; a member of the Royal Society in London, he spent several years in Paris. But Hjärne voted that two of the women who had had sexual relations with the devil should be burnt on a bonfire. This was one of the last witch burnings in Europe.

Alchemists had a broad knowledge of natural magic; they were also metallurgists, physicians and astronomers. Paracelsus taught that the world consists of three universal ‘principles’ – the principle of salt, the principle of sulphur and the principle of mercury. God designated one of the elements, fire, to separate these principles. In 1661 the scientist and alchemist Robert Boyle, one of the directors of the English East India Company, published his treatise The Sceptical Chemist , which was directed against Paracelsus. The world consists not of three principles and four elements but of a countless number of atoms, which bump into each other in chance encounters. The chemical elements are primary substances that cannot be taken any further apart. Boyle thought it possible that elements could transmute; in his world there was no ether, but lead could nevertheless become gold.

From Sweden to Peru, the miners’ lives were shaped by their ores, just as the neighbouring peasants’ lives were shaped by their cereals and cattle. The peasants lived on the surface; they ploughed their land and the land of their masters. The mines went deep underground, the furnaces reached up into the sky, and the wealth that they produced also had peaks and troughs. The peasants lived by tradition and calculation; they knew what they would do in winter and what in summer, which field would be ploughed the following year and which would lie fallow. The miners and blacksmiths lived by secret knowledge combined with sheer fluke. In every mining town, local legends told about how metal was found there by chance: in Tyrolean Schwaz a peasant woman wandering across a field with her cow stumbled across a nugget of silver. In Saxon Halle a shiny gleam of ore revealed itself on a roadside verge while someone was transporting salt. These were unheard of treasures; but then strangers who didn’t speak the local language tasted and smelt the ore, dissolved it in urine, crushed it to a powder and heated it in crucibles. Alchemists believed that metals grew in the earth in the same way as plants; they sought the magic words that would allow them to smelt lead into gold. But their mystical language really helped them to distinguish metals, purify ore, plan mines, reinforce them and pump the water out. These people often belonged to the medical profession; the bowels of the earth seemed to them to be a living organism which could experience growth, convulsions and bloating with gases. The juices of the earth, such as mercury, entered into a sexual union with metals such as silver. Monotheism was left at the entry to the mine and the smelting furnace; within them ‘prejudices’ ruled. Witches and trolls were the true rulers of the mines; physiological analogies and poetic metaphors were the tools of the craft. But they did help to control the highly complex processes of smelting, casting, forging and tempering.

Alchemy was the profession of refugees, counterfeiters and spies. Scary and comical, their contribution to the establishment of early modernity competed with those of the giants of the Italian Renaissance. This was an alternative Renaissance, a mineral reawakening. Its leaders weren’t artists and humanists, but entrepreneurs and alchemists. It makes perfect sense that the Reformation was engendered in such an atmosphere. The Renaissance was moving to the east and the north of Europe; its last site – the Prague of Emperor Rudolph II – saw an unprecedented blossoming of arts and sciences, with the alchemists stealing the show. Their furnaces produced neither gold nor immortality, but they forged modernity. Many of the alchemists’ undertakings were carried out in imitation of the East; they were not so much seeking new materials as trying to reproduce known and expensive ones. 15 In 1708 the elector of Saxony, August II, arrested the Prussian refugee Johann Friedrich Böttger; in prison, the alchemist found a method of mixing kaolin and alabaster, achieving vitrification – the formation of a glass-like material that was similar to Chinese porcelain. This was the origin of the factory in Meissen which would go on to bring great profits to Saxony.

In a similar way, the alchemists had success with gunpowder. The key element was saltpetre (rock salt), a strangely named substance which bacteria create while breaking down organic matter. In China, saltpetre was simply collected from the surface of the soil – in some places it emerged as a layer of white powder. Europe developed its own methods of preparing it. Elongated pits were filled with manure, straw and ashes, covered over and then left for a year; to be on the safe side they were drenched with urine, and occasionally the contents were mixed. Then water was poured into the pits, the solution was mixed with ashes and evaporated. In this way, gunpowder was produced from manure and rubbish. Its discovery was the result of the folk knowledge of the East, followed by meticulous imitation by the West. Gunpowder was adopted for military ends and also for the mining industry. While the mass manufacture of cannons and muskets increased the demand for metals, new mines used explosives along with chisels and axes. 16

Like other low-capital, time-consuming trades, the production of saltpetre flourished in the Baltic lands. Dutch merchants transported it to Amsterdam and then to England. Grand empires were dependent on saltpetre which foreign peasants made from their farmyard waste. In 1579 in England, the Eastland Company was formed to trade in saltpetre, hemp and other Baltic products. Then the alchemist Lazarus Ercker, the head of Emperor Rudolph II’s Bohemian mines, revealed the secrets of saltpetre using scales, proportions and diagrams. Based on these new recipes, the British crown obliged its landowners and farmers to make saltpetre. In the sixteenth century the ‘saltpetre men’ went around private estates collecting ready-made saltpetre. Then, in distant Morocco, deposits of mineral saltpetre were found; similar treasures were found in India, and new monopolies undertook the business. A century later Ercker’s alchemical treatise served as the basis of an impressive debate in the Royal Society in London; the luminaries of the new science debated the transformation of manure into saltpetre. Robert Boyle’s celebrated invention, the air pump, was made during his work on saltpetre. 17

Although he laid down the foundations of experimental science, Boyle remained an alchemist; throughout his life he sought the red elixir which would turn lead into gold and attract angels. The air pump demonstrated the strength of science – Boyle pumped air out of a transparent glass retort in which he had placed a bird, which suffocated in the vacuum. In fact the famous air pump was a simpler invention than many of the mechanisms that metallurgists used in their furnaces. The body of the pump was made from Swedish copper. There, in the wooded hills of the North, miners extracted ore by heating the rock with large fires overnight and breaking chunks off. They pulled the chunks up to the mill and pulverised them into a powder with hammers powered by a waterwheel, then heated the powder on an open fire for a week and smelted it in a furnace. To remove the molten metal, they had to destroy the stove. Then they crushed the metal again. The stove was rebuilt and the ore was resmelted. The whole process took up to three months. Endless trials and errors by local craftsmen were supervised by the cameralist Bureau of Mines, a body made up of aristocrats and alchemists.

The eighteenth century was a time of disenchantment, and this infected alchemy sooner than other branches of natural magic. Having lost the Great Northern War with Russia, the Swedish king, Charles XII, closed the chemical laboratory of the Bureau of Mines and switched his scientists to engineering projects. In 1705 Charles captured Otto Arnold von Paykull, the commander of the Saxon cavalry and a key ally of the Russian troops; a Swedish nobleman by birth, he was sent for trial as a traitor. Paykull also happened to be an alchemist. In the course of his trial he said that he possessed the secret of making gold and promised to share his art in exchange for clemency. The Bureau of Mines guaranteed that Paykull could make Sweden richer than ever, but the king executed the alchemist-cavalryman.

A little later, a new star appeared in this circle – the heir of a wealthy family of mine-owners, Emanuel Swedenborg. He was born very near Falun, a gigantic mine dug among idyllic lakes and forests in central Sweden; both Emanuel’s grandfathers were stockholders in this mine. Started by the Vikings, at its peak in the seventeenth century it produced two-thirds of global copper. Copper from Falun covered the palace of Versailles, was minted into Swedish coins, and was a primary source of wealth for the kingdom. A thousand workers toiled there, burning huge fires and sinking shafts into the rock bottom of three separate pits. The fire-setting method of mining devoured tons of wood; the pits were covered in dense smoke. After visiting the mine, Carl Linnaeus wrote, ‘it was horrible as hell itself.’ On Midsummer’s Eve 1687, just a few months before Swedenborg’s birth, a big part of the mine collapsed: the walls between the three open pits fell down, creating a sinkhole about 100 metres deep and destroying shafts and caves underneath. No one was killed: it was a holiday, the one such day of the year apart from Christmas. The mine continued working, but its output halved.

The family wealth was not completely lost. After studying Lutheran theology in Uppsala, young Swedenborg spent four years in London. A regular visitor to the Royal Society, he bought an air pump there, which might well have been made of copper from his Falun mine, and took it back to Sweden. Charles XII, an admirer of all things English, appointed him an assessor of the Bureau of Mines. Compared to the previous generations of alchemists, Swedenborg looked like an empiricist. His specialty was mechanics, and he worked on new constructions for mines, canals and bridges. He wrote long books – one about copper, another about iron. He also wrote elegiac poetry about the catastrophe of Falun. 18 Later in his life Swedenborg had strange dreams and visions. Christ appeared to him and ordered him to transform the world. The mine official conversed with the spirits of the dead who visited him in the form of angels. He published one anonymous work after another until, in 1760, he admitted his authorship and became the most celebrated mystic of the century. Focused on telepathy and clairvoyance, he understood them mechanically: thought is a vibration, like sound and sight, and fine membranes in the brain respond to oscillations. Before that midsummer day in Falun, subterranean rumblings had foreshadowed the collapse, and this is how psychic powers work. The mechanical engineer turned into a spiritualist and visionary. However, at this point he left the Bureau of Mines, where he had worked for more than thirty years. 19

Cameralism

In mid-eighteenth century Europe, the hard tasks of royal management engendered a new kind of political science. Cameralism, or ‘office science’, was the continental counterpart of mercantilism; in practice, the theories of cameralism were more like the doctrine of the French physiocrats (see chapter 10 ), only cameralism gave pride of place to mines and metals rather than to fields and grain. Nearly every land in the Holy Roman Empire and then in the Baltic countries had its Camera – an administration that worked for the ruler of the land, whether he was prince, baron or bishop. The Camera housed civil servants and scribes, who collected revenue, did the accounts, and dealt with complaints. Now this system was to be regulated by the new science.

In relation to mines and metals, the new science worked out a symbol of faith which was the opposite of alchemy. Seven metals exist – gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, tin and mercury. These primary elements cannot be transformed, but there are also alloys, such as bronze, and ‘semi-metals’ – arsenic, manganese, and more. The universe is like a machine – a watch or a clock, or maybe a sailing ship; the chemical elements are its parts. The way of turning matter into gold is to manufacture goods and sell them in the market. Traditional for an entrepreneur, this task was new for a statesman. On the one hand, the princes of Northern and Central Europe, where wars were constant, organised their rule for military purposes. Civil servants wore uniforms, had hierarchical titles, and submitted to a particular form of discipline; many of them were, in fact, retired officers. On the other hand, the sovereigns understood that the tasks of civil servants were quite different to those of army officers: bureaucrats must bring money to the state’s coffers, whereas officers were only able to spend it. In fact the classics of politics and policy that the cameralists read – Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pufendorf – mostly discussed how to spend revenue. Now the cameralists promised their masters that they would create a science which would show them how to make money.

The cameralists realised that money could be found only in three places: the crown could take silver from its subjects, earn it through enterprises that belonged to the crown, or borrow from its foreign peers. While French, English and Scottish texts of the time discussed labour and taxes, the chief subject of German cameral science was natural resources. There were forests, grain, salt, linen, wheat and wool. The trouble with diffused resources was that there was no one to sell them to: the neighbouring lands also had linen, wheat and wool. Therefore it came down to grain and timber, if only they could be transported by sea. For the Baltic lands, there was also potash (originally, pot ash ). Burning 1,000 kilograms of oak produced 1 kilogram of potash, which the English wool industry needed in massive quantities. Following the great Swedish model, the ultimate dream of rulers was to own metal works; but only a handful (Saxony, Hannover, Austria and Hungary) had mines, and many of them were not profitable. Cameralists were also concerned about the population. For the mercantilists, people emigrating overseas reduced the burden of domestic consumption; cameralist regimes guarded their populations more jealously, and sometimes even competed for migrants. 20

The Seven Years’ War began when Frederick II occupied neutral Saxony, the centre of mining activity. It was clear to everyone that the great struggle between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was primarily for possession of the mines of Silesia and Saxony. If the minor princes, these distant heirs of Gilgamesh, hoped that their forests would fill the state coffers, the sovereigns of Prussia and Austria understood the role of the mines. Focused on metals, their cameralists paid less attention to traditional trades in grain, timber, potash or hemp, even though these massive exports brought money to their lands. 21 According to the law of Bergregal , all mines belonged to the ruling prince. For a landowner, the discovery of ore on his land could mean the eventual confiscation of his property. In practice, princes and vassals usually came to a compromise which would deliver profits for both sides. But the revenues were in the future, while the mines needed initial capital. The Cameras sought investors, and frequently these were foreigners – usually Dutchmen. Alternatively, the princes pledged their future profits in exchange for direct investments – bankers from southern Germany proposed such transactions. Once it had obtained funds, the Camera appointed managers with experience in the mining business, and the managers hired miners who were also often foreigners. There was never enough money, so the Camera made use of non-economic incentives. The miners often had a judicial privilege so that they could not be put on trial by the local civil courts, as if these miners were colonists in lands populated by natives. And sometimes they were colonists: German-trained cameralists spread their influence all over the European north – Scandinavia, Poland and Russia.

Since the time of Luther and Fugger, the life of the German lands had been connected with the subterranean world of the mines just as the life of the British Isles was connected to overseas colonies. In need of experts, princely states launched mining academies – Saxony in 1765, Prussia in 1770. When Ingolstadt organised a new academic centre for cameralists in 1784, its president defined its subject as ‘the science of resources’ (Quellen Wissenschaften ). 22 Leading German minds were trained as mining engineers, and many of them actually managed the extraction: Leibniz oversaw the booming mines in the Harz mountains, Goethe worked for the silver and copper mines of Ilmenau, Novalis served as a director of salt mines in Saxony, Humboldt managed the Freiberg mining field. No surprise that these Romantics perceived the unpredictable but fruitful environment of the mine as their chosen metaphor for the life of the soul. 23 If the mind was a mine and the poet a digger in search of truth, he could refine and sublimate his precious findings by using the hidden tradition of miners and smelters. Romantic literature developed as the alchemy of feelings, with psychology as its new scientific incarnation.

When the Seven Years’ War began, Frederick the Great appointed the leader of the cameralist movement, Johann von Justi, as the chief inspector of the Prussian mines, glassworks and steelworks. Born in Saxony, Justi began his career as the head of police in Göttingen and then became a professor of cameral science at the university there. The ‘iron kingdom’ of Frederick was poor in ores; it exported timber and grain so that it could buy iron in Saxony, Sweden and Russia. The Seven Years’ War ruined Saxony and interrupted supplies from Russia. The price of English and Swedish iron kept rising, and the Prussian artillery lagged behind its rivals. The war ended with the miraculous salvation of Frederick, and it became a matter of survival for Prussia to smelt its own iron. The king knew about the deposits of iron ore which were found to the east of the Oder. But the iron there was low grade, and the king put his faith in science. Frederick was particularly interested in the process of ‘tempering’, which had been invented by the English: iron blanks were heated for weeks in a mix of charcoal, ashes and salts. The iron absorbed carbon and became strong and durable; but the process depended on the characteristics of the local ore, and only the Swedes managed to reproduce it successfully.

By this time Justi had written many books on the theory and practice of cameralism; he had also written about metals. His fiscal theory was considered an achievement, but his conception of metallurgy was not very different from that of the alchemists. In his view, metal was obtained when the heat of the furnace caused inert matter to combine with phlogiston. The appointment of Justi to the mines was disastrous. One of the furnaces built to his design produced iron that was fit only for making horseshoes; another one produced no metal whatsoever. To fuel his furnaces he cut down trees in two royal parks, leading to conflict with Frederick’s personal forester. His new method of smelting copper didn’t work either; it turned out that he couldn’t distinguish between copper ore and barren rocks. In 1768 the enraged king sent Justi to prison, where he went blind and soon perished.

Historians disagree about how much he was to blame; early biographies posited that Justi was guilty only of ignorance, but recently discovered documents mention forgery and embezzlement. 24 Whatever the case, over millennia the same tragedy overtook the owners and managers of mines and boreholes from Sextus Marius to Mikhail Khodorkovsky: some were guilty, others not, but the nature of evil runs deeper than the passion for profit. Rare raw materials are profitable for their owners, opaque to inspection, ruinous for society. Their geographical distribution is beyond rational understanding. Even Frederick the Great, an experienced and thrifty ruler, was tempted by the fantasies of Justi; and nobody could explain to him why his inept neighbours had good iron while he did not. Nature originates the conditions for evil, but it is people who are the evil doers, and when they punish evil they multiply it.

The Demidovs

The Russian lands were familiar with bog iron from the time of the Vikings. Deposits of bog iron were scattered under peat or lay in the silt at the bottom of lakes. These deposits were widely distributed but were known mostly in the northern lands; when the wetlands were drained, bog iron was forgotten. In fact, it is a renewable product of natural biotechnology: anaerobic bacteria, Leptothrix, create nuggets of iron in ferruginous water in the absence of air. This iron can be harvested and the process will continue. New nuggets will have formed after a couple of decades, as long as the bog hasn’t been drained in the meantime. Such nuggets are usually hidden in turf, water or peat. As the bacteria digest the iron, they secrete an oily liquid that floats on the surface of the water in patches. Looking for the nuggets is like looking for mushrooms; it involves a lot of labour, time and local knowledge, but requires no capital investment at all. The techniques for smelting the nuggets in single-use stoves, and for hammering and reforging the iron, were also accessible to many primitive smallholdings scattered about the northern expanses. This was how the Vikings obtained their iron, and they disseminated their craft round the northern lands. Unlike mined ore, which concentrated highly valuable production around a few mines, bog iron was a diffused resource like timber, peat and grain. Even during the Renaissance, when mines supplied iron to the massed armies of Western Europe, iron was still extracted from bogs on the north of the continent, for example in the Novgorod republic. When supplies of bog iron were depleted as a result of the felling of the forests and the draining of the wetlands, metalworks moved further north and east. The main region for bog metal ores was the sparsely populated Olonets district, today’s Karelia – a quiet, distant corner of Russia, bordering Finland. Local blacksmiths performed wonders, and in the nineteenth century they forged bog iron that was close to the quality of steel. 25 Bog ore was also known in North America – some rails and ploughs were made of this cheap iron.

In 1639, the Dutch merchant Andrey Vinius founded the first mining and smelting factory near Tula, the birthplace of Russian metallurgy, not far from Moscow. He became a Russian subject, and the Kremlin gave him hundreds of serfs. Vinius soon switched to tar and wool, but his son became the head of the Siberian chancellery. 26 Central Russia was poor in ores, but the military ambitions of the tsars required them in large quantities. Moving from the centre to the distant peripheries of the country, mining involved alien landscapes, exotic peoples and mysterious religions.

A blacksmith from Tula, Nikita Demidov, brought metal works to the Urals and Siberia. 27 A charismatic and enigmatic Old Believer, he would grow into one of the most productive of Russian entrepreneurs – the actual creator of the country’s industrial revolution. It so happened that all the Russian ore sites – in Olonets, the Urals and the Altai mountains – had large concentrations of Old Believers, who were clearly attracted by the new industry. Conservative and secretive, they eagerly interacted with foreign experts. Historians have paid much attention to the visiting scientists and managers – English, Dutch, Saxon and Swedish. But I believe that the most interesting part of this story is their mutual understanding with the ‘natives’, who were either endemic peoples of Siberia or exiled Old Believers. 28 As in the Spanish mines in America, technical knowledge came largely from Europe, but the local folk – most of them also colonial settlers – appropriated it, combined it with their beliefs, and grew into the masters of the business.

After the Time of Troubles, the Moscow state had introduced a church reform. A significant part of the population, particularly in distant provinces, did not accept it. Some Old Believers refused to serve in the army, others rejected the use of the money or other official papers, and many believed that the tsar was the Antichrist. Culturally conservative, they were mobile, industrious and secretive; some of the biggest merchant families, including the Demidovs, came from these people. In the eighteenth century Old Believers encountered harsh oppression, including double taxation, resettlement, or conscription under torture. Some of them, such as the Demidovs, concealed their beliefs; others were persecuted. In several well-documented cases, Old Believers committed collective suicide, usually by self-immolation, when pursued by military units. In 1684 a cloister of the Old Believers was founded on a remote lake by monks who had fled from the Solovetsky Monastery when it was occupied by the Moscow troops. Many of them were Pomors – members of an ethnic community who still populate the European North of Russia. To escape persecution, in 1694 the Pomor monks resettled even further to the north. They founded a monastery on an island in the River Vyg, between Olonets and the White Sea, and collected ore from this vast area. In 1701 Peter I invited master craftsmen from Saxony to Olonets. Led by Johann Friedrich Blüher from Freiberg, the Saxonians installed new furnaces in the Olonets factories. These labour-intensive processes required discipline and exact timing, and also an endless quantity of charcoal. There was plenty of birch in the area, but manpower was a more difficult question. In 1702 thousands of the Pomor Old Believers were signed up at the ‘Olonets mountain factory’ – this was a Russian analogue of the Spanish mita . These pious sectarians had their own understanding of the life of metals; although we know even less about their beliefs than about the shamanic ideas of the Native Americans of Potosí, the Pomors were equally efficient. Clearly, their ideas were compatible with those of their Saxonian visitors, who taught them – and learnt from them – in the name of ‘science’.

Religious minorities often worked in the metal industries. The Huguenots, fleeing persecution in France, brought their metal-making skills to England and later to Prussia; Abraham Darby, who was the first to turn coal into coke and smelt pig iron, was a Quaker. It is hardly surprising that the production of metal in Russia was in the hands of Old Believers. But northern iron was an accursed business: the history of this idyllic territory was as packed with dramatic incidents as an adventure story from the South Seas. Monasteries were built by some, only to be destroyed by others. The ‘mountain factories’ bonded thousands of peasants as their ‘factory serfs’. In 1702, Peter I assigned some factories in the Urals to Demidov. Thousands of Old Believers found refuge there. Some miners perished in 1723 in the mass self-immolation at Yelunsk, near Tomsk: over 500 people committed suicide rather than give themselves up to the troops sent by the tsar-Antichrist. In 1735 the government investigated the Old Believers working for Demidov; 2,000 of them were discovered in just one factory. Nikita Demidov was constantly accused of heresy – trials and denunciations occurred throughout his life. By giving shelter to thousands of schismatics and runaway serfs, he was breaking the law but obtaining a cheap and devoted workforce.

At this time of unending wars, bureaucratic experience was transmitted from one enemy to another. Peter’s Twelve Colleges, the first experiment in ministerial rule in Russia, were modelled on the Swedish pattern. In 1719 the Berg College, the Russian version of the Bureau of Mines, was set up with the rights of a ministry. Its first president was the Scottish immigrant James (in Russia, Jacob) Bruce, an artilleryman and alchemist. The Saxonian Johann Blüher was the leading expert. During the Northern War with Sweden, Peter I relayed urgent orders to Demidov. The Ural iron was considered the equal of Swedish iron, but Demidov’s cannons cost only half as much. During the war Demidov got the monopoly on supplying cannons, anchors and nails for the Russian Navy. He also obtained the right to export his iron. Demidov used the advanced technology of watermills to provide energy for the blacksmiths’ bellows, hammers and drills. He built dams, canals and sluice gates – the same rivers that provided transportation gave energy for production; just one of his factories, in Barnaul, had fourteen waterwheels that powered twenty different machines. 29 Demidov’s blast furnaces were much taller than the Tula furnaces in central Russia, and five times more productive. And he became fabulously rich from his munitions work. Towards the end of his life he was producing two-thirds of all iron in Russia. He died in Tula in 1725, the same year as his patron, Peter I.

Nikita Demidov had three sons; after their father’s death they were ennobled. According to Nikita’s will, his eldest son, Akinfy, inherited all the factories and estates. The youngest son, Nikita, served in the Berg College and built state factories. The middle son, Grigory, was murdered by his son Ivan, who was executed for the crime. A worthy heir, Akinfy Demidov continued to expand to the east; he opened new factories in the Altai, close to the Chinese border. Copper and rare metals were processed there, and silver was also present. Demidov’s people extracted it from the mine they dug on the Zmeiny (Serpentine) Mountain. The Saxonian Johann Samuel Christiany ran the business. There were rumours that he was minting silver for Demidov without the exchequer’s knowledge; but, unlike his compatriot Justi, he survived. Management skills and the ability to keep secrets were rare talents which both Demidovs possessed in abundance. Running dozens of factories situated in such remote places that letters from them could take years to arrive, they needed a network of people in whom they had complete confidence; the Old Believer community was fundamental to this.

Expanding their mining network across Siberia, delivering silver from the Altai and iron from the Urals to St Petersburg, the Demidovs built new roads, canals and bridges. From 1723, their workers were free from conscription, and their factories were granted the right to buy and sell serfs. However, after the death of Akinfy Demidov in 1745 an investigation began into the silver workings on the Serpentine Mountain in the Altai. But no crime was found, or it was discreetly ignored. The reasons why Christiany did not share the dismal fate of his compatriot Justi were simple: there really was silver in the Serpentine Mountain, and Christiany’s skills were also real. In 1764, in one of these Altai factories, the engineer Ivan Polzunov, a Siberian peasant who had studied in the Urals, built the first steam engine that didn’t depend on a waterwheel. Emancipating the energy of coal from the flow of the river, Polzunov’s engine started the second phase of the global industrial revolution: his steam engine was the first ever that could be installed anywhere, even on the top of a mountain, though it needed a three-storey building.

Like his father before him, Akinfy also had three sons, but he left the business to the youngest, Nikita. The eldest son, Prokofiy, disputed the will, accusing Nikita of the heresy of Old Belief. The empress Elizabeth I personally supported Prokofiy; the Demidov empire was split, and the sons received equal shares. Prokofiy worked as a botanist, helped the poor and founded a bank, but he was mostly known for his various eccentricities; in 1778 he organised a public festivity in St Petersburg, and for some reason hundreds of people died from drinking wine there. The other sons travelled abroad a great deal. Nikita, the youngest son and his father’s favourite, corresponded with Voltaire but took no interest in the mines. Nikita’s son, Nikolay, preferred Tuscany, where he became a noted philanthropist. He bought up property throughout Italy, and there is a square named after him in Florence. His son, Anatoly, married a niece of Napoleon. The ancestral line degenerated from disgraced but industrious Old Believers to high, indolent nobility.

Note

Notes

1 Goody, Metals, Culture and Capitalism . 2 Needleman and Needleman, ‘Lead poisoning and the decline of the Roman aristocracy’. 3 Childe, Man Makes Himself ; Drews, The End of the Bronze Age . 4 Graeber, Debt . 5 Muhly et al., ‘Iron in Anatolia and the nature of the Hittite iron industry’; Pense, ‘Iron through the ages’; Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality . 6 Collins, ‘Mineral enterprise in China’; Hartwell, ‘A cycle of economic change in imperial China’; Lynch, Mining in World History . 7 Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived . 8 Fors, The Limits of Matter . 9 Jardine, Worldy Goods . 10 Roper, Martin Luther ; Schilling and Johnston, Martin Luther . 11 Cole, The Potosí Mita ; Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty ; Lane, Potosí ; Barragán, ‘Extractive economy and institutions’. 12 Nriagu, ‘Mercury pollution’; Lynch, Mining in World History ; Lane, Potosí . 13 De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis ; Fagan, The Little Ice Age ; Parker and Smith, The General Crisis of the 17th Century ; Koch et al., ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival’; Blom, Nature’s Mutiny . 14 Koch et al., ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival’. 15 Principe, ‘Alchemy restored’; Smith, The Business of Alchemy ; Bauer, The Alchemy of Conquest ; Fors, The Limits of Matter . 16 Cressy, Salpeter ; Buchanan, Gunpowder, Explosives and the State ; Robertson, ‘Reworking seventeenth-century saltpetre’. 17 Robertson, ‘A gunpowder controversy in the early Royal Society’; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump . 18 McCune, ‘Mining the connections’; Heckscher, An Economic History of Sweden , pp. 85–7. 19 Fors, The Limits of Matter , pp. 84–90. 20 Bartlett, ‘Cameralism in Russia’. 21 Tribe, ‘Baltic cameralism?’. 22 Small, The Cameralists ; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State ; Raskov, ‘Kameralizm knig’; Zubkov, ‘Kameralizm kak model’’. 23 Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions , p. 18. 24 Adam, The Political Economy of J. H. G. Justi ; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State . 25 Kolchin, ‘Obrabotka zheleza’; Serbina, Krest’y anskaia zhelezodelatel’naya promyshlennost’ . 26 Boterbloem, Moderniser of Russia ; Yurkin, Andrei Andreevich Vinius . 27 Ogarkov, Demidovy ; Hudson, The Rise of the Demidov Family . 28 Pashkov, ‘Inostrannye spetsialisty’; Yurkin, ‘Genrikh Butenant’; Kiselev, ‘State metallurgy factories’. 29 ‘Sozdanie pervoi v mire universalnoi parovoi mashiny’.