Mining and metallurgy in the diffusion of cameralism in the Iberian world during the 18th century

Abstract

This article highlights the importance of the field of mining and metallurgy in the dissemination of cameralist ideas in the eighteenth-century Iberian world. Although mining and metallurgy may not seem at first obvious topics for the analysis of cameralism, they were in fact fundamental topics in the cameral sciences literature and allow us to capture in an expressive way the importance given in this literature to the production of useful knowledge of the natural world, allowing for important connections with the enlightened reformism in southern Europe and in the Iberian world in particular. The article gives particular emphasis to a key institution in this process of diffusion, the Mining Academy (Bergakademie) of Freiberg, focusing simultaneously on the trajectories of Spanish and Portuguese students who were there in the last decades of the eighteenth century, to shed light on new questions about the diffusion of cameralist ideas in the context of Iberian Enlightened Reformism.