Leibniz in the Harz: History, Invention, and the Archives of Nature

My project explores the shifting boundaries of the human and the natural toward the end of the seventeenth century. I will focus on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who wrote both human and natural histories. Leibniz, official historian for the House of Hannover, reconstructed the history of the earth from fossils and strata, using the “archives of nature” to create new narratives about prehistory. I want to make sense of the world in which he worked, a world unburdened by our divisions between human history and natural history.

Behind these larger themes lies a tale of invention, intrigue and failure. Leibniz worked incessantly between 1679 and 1686 to establish his wind machines in the mines of the Harz Mountains. This was the experience that informed his Protogaea (1691), or history of the earth. (The first English translation of the work, which I did together with Claudine Cohen, appeared in 2008.) Drawing on archival documents from Clausthal and Hannover that I have been collecting for several years, my book will tell the story of Leibniz's invention, his struggles to establish it, and the ultimate failure of the venture. Moreover, the book will connect his failed entrepreneurship to larger questions about history, enlightenment and industrialization. This project unifies the two primary strands of my research. I have, on the one hand, spent years examining how fiscal systems shape the production of knowledge, which has taken me deep into the mines, fields and forests of the Holy Roman Empire. These preoccupations have, in turn, prompted me to examine the function of the sciences within such systems, suggesting that our existing notions of “useful knowledge” suffer from a lack of depth and complexity.