( Completed: 2011)
Education of Mining Experts, 18th and 19th Centuries
Cooperation Partners: Hartmut Schleiff, Institute for the History of Science and Technology, TU Bergakademie Freiberg
The research project focuses on the development of a new type of scientifically educated functional elites. It connects questions from the areas of history of science (mining sciences), the history of teaching institutions (mining academy), the history of administration (Theresian reforms) and the history of professions. The questions are framed by two crucial assumptions, that 1. the educational project that led to the formation of a corps of mining engineers was at the same time a part of administrative and economic reforms leading to a new configuration of bonds between state, economy and science, and became characteristic for the modern era; and that 2. the status of this new group of experts was substantially predicated by the new emerging corpora of the scientific, technological and cameralist knowledge of the time between 1750 and 1850.
A comparative project on the territory of Saxony is under way at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg.
