Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

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