On the 27–30 March 2025, Orrje presented his paper "Subterranean Supervision. Codification of Miners’ Techniques in the Bergskollegium, 1620–1750" at the workshop "Knowing in Action", arranged by Simon Schaffer (Cambridge) and Lissa Roberts (Twente).

During the autumn of 1621 the councilor Carl Bonde (1581–1652), in charge of overseeing and developing the Swedish metal trades, wrote a letter to the Lord High Chancellor. Distraught and overworked, he complained how “when I am still, I am alright. But as soon as I think that I should answer this and that, then I do not sleep”. Though a privileged nobleman, his complaints were not completely unwarranted. His days consisted not only of increasing amounts of paperwork but were also spent on horseback and in mineshafts as he toured the realm to inspect disparate local worksites. As an early modern mining inspector, he was thus constantly observing, engaging with, and communicating details about workers’ bodily techniques.

In this presentation, I focus on the mobile officials of the early modern Swedish mining administration that emerged through the 1600s. At its onset, it consisted only of a handful of men, who, like Bonde, reported directly to the king and his council. During the second half of the century, it would however grow into the formalized and independent Bergskollegium, an extensive state administrative bureau consisting of, e.g., clerks, notaries, chemists, mechanics, drawing engineers, and archivists. From this time, its mobile officials would travel both domestically and throughout Europe to document the work of miners, blacksmiths, and merchants.

Whereas invisible technicians and tacit knowledge have been a key concern in history of science since the 1980s, recent studies of early modern administrative techniques for controlling workers by codifying their work, instead, highlight attempts to subordinate similar historical actors by making them visible. In their efforts to understand, and thus extend their authority over miners, the mobile officials of the Bergskollegium relied on information from local go-betweens, such as foremen and ironmasters, residing at rural workplaces. However, the officials also carried out on-site inspections, during which they directly witnessed ongoing work and engaged with mining themselves through experiments. All these activities generated an increasing amount of documentation, which was communicated back to a central archive through an emerging administrative information infrastructure. I argue that this archive constitutes an important source for understanding the work involved in codifying localized work techniques. I also explore to what extent these sources can be used to uncover the gestural knowledge found in early modern mining communities, which have left little to no historical records of their own.