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Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]
- Автор: Эткинд Александр Маркович
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wiley
- Переводчик: Sara Jolly
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]». Краткое содержание книги:
The Seven Years’ War began when Frederick II occupied neutral Saxony, the centre of mining activity. It was clear to everyone that the great struggle between the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs was primarily for possession of the mines of Silesia and Saxony. If the minor princes, these distant heirs of Gilgamesh, hoped that their forests would fill the state coffers, the sovereigns of Prussia and Austria understood the role of the mines. Focused on metals, their cameralists paid less attention to traditional trades in grain, timber, potash or hemp, even though these massive exports brought money to their lands. 21 According to the law of Bergregal , all mines belonged to the ruling prince. For a landowner, the discovery of ore on his land could mean the eventual confiscation of his property. In practice, princes and vassals usually came to a compromise which would deliver profits for both sides. But the revenues were in the future, while the mines needed initial capital. The Cameras sought investors, and frequently these were foreigners – usually Dutchmen. Alternatively, the princes pledged their future profits in exchange for direct investments – bankers from southern Germany proposed such transactions. Once it had obtained funds, the Camera appointed managers with experience in the mining business, and the managers hired miners who were also often foreigners. There was never enough money, so the Camera made use of non-economic incentives. The miners often had a judicial privilege so that they could not be put on trial by the local civil courts, as if these miners were colonists in lands populated by natives. And sometimes they were colonists: German-trained cameralists spread their influence all over the European north – Scandinavia, Poland and Russia.
Since the time of Luther and Fugger, the life of the German lands had been connected with the subterranean world of the mines just as the life of the British Isles was connected to overseas colonies. In need of experts, princely states launched mining academies – Saxony in 1765, Prussia in 1770. When Ingolstadt organised a new academic centre for cameralists in 1784, its president defined its subject as ‘the science of resources’ (Quellen Wissenschaften ). 22 Leading German minds were trained as mining engineers, and many of them actually managed the extraction: Leibniz oversaw the booming mines in the Harz mountains, Goethe worked for the silver and copper mines of Ilmenau, Novalis served as a director of salt mines in Saxony, Humboldt managed the Freiberg mining field. No surprise that these Romantics perceived the unpredictable but fruitful environment of the mine as their chosen metaphor for the life of the soul. 23 If the mind was a mine and the poet a digger in search of truth, he could refine and sublimate his precious findings by using the hidden tradition of miners and smelters. Romantic literature developed as the alchemy of feelings, with psychology as its new scientific incarnation.
When the Seven Years’ War began, Frederick the Great appointed the leader of the cameralist movement, Johann von Justi, as the chief inspector of the Prussian mines, glassworks and steelworks. Born in Saxony, Justi began his career as the head of police in Göttingen and then became a professor of cameral science at the university there. The ‘iron kingdom’ of Frederick was poor in ores; it exported timber and grain so that it could buy iron in Saxony, Sweden and Russia. The Seven Years’ War ruined Saxony and interrupted supplies from Russia. The price of English and Swedish iron kept rising, and the Prussian artillery lagged behind its rivals. The war ended with the miraculous salvation of Frederick, and it became a matter of survival for Prussia to smelt its own iron. The king knew about the deposits of iron ore which were found to the east of the Oder. But the iron there was low grade, and the king put his faith in science. Frederick was particularly interested in the process of ‘tempering’, which had been invented by the English: iron blanks were heated for weeks in a mix of charcoal, ashes and salts. The iron absorbed carbon and became strong and durable; but the process depended on the characteristics of the local ore, and only the Swedes managed to reproduce it successfully.
By this time Justi had written many books on the theory and practice of cameralism; he had also written about metals. His fiscal theory was considered an achievement, but his conception of metallurgy was not very different from that of the alchemists. In his view, metal was obtained when the heat of the furnace caused inert matter to combine with phlogiston. The appointment of Justi to the mines was disastrous. One of the furnaces built to his design produced iron that was fit only for making horseshoes; another one produced no metal whatsoever. To fuel his furnaces he cut down trees in two royal parks, leading to conflict with Frederick’s personal forester. His new method of smelting copper didn’t work either; it turned out that he couldn’t distinguish between copper ore and barren rocks. In 1768 the enraged king sent Justi to prison, where he went blind and soon perished.
Historians disagree about how much he was to blame; early biographies posited that Justi was guilty only of ignorance, but recently discovered documents mention forgery and embezzlement. 24 Whatever the case, over millennia the same tragedy overtook the owners and managers of mines and boreholes from Sextus Marius to Mikhail Khodorkovsky: some were guilty, others not, but the nature of evil runs deeper than the passion for profit. Rare raw materials are profitable for their owners, opaque to inspection, ruinous for society. Their geographical distribution is beyond rational understanding. Even Frederick the Great, an experienced and thrifty ruler, was tempted by the fantasies of Justi; and nobody could explain to him why his inept neighbours had good iron while he did not. Nature originates the conditions for evil, but it is people who are the evil doers, and when they punish evil they multiply it.
The Demidovs
The Russian lands were familiar with bog iron from the time of the Vikings. Deposits of bog iron were scattered under peat or lay in the silt at the bottom of lakes. These deposits were widely distributed but were known mostly in the northern lands; when the wetlands were drained, bog iron was forgotten. In fact, it is a renewable product of natural biotechnology: anaerobic bacteria, Leptothrix, create nuggets of iron in ferruginous water in the absence of air. This iron can be harvested and the process will continue. New nuggets will have formed after a couple of decades, as long as the bog hasn’t been drained in the meantime. Such nuggets are usually hidden in turf, water or peat. As the bacteria digest the iron, they secrete an oily liquid that floats on the surface of the water in patches. Looking for the nuggets is like looking for mushrooms; it involves a lot of labour, time and local knowledge, but requires no capital investment at all. The techniques for smelting the nuggets in single-use stoves, and for hammering and reforging the iron, were also accessible to many primitive smallholdings scattered about the northern expanses. This was how the Vikings obtained their iron, and they disseminated their craft round the northern lands. Unlike mined ore, which concentrated highly valuable production around a few mines, bog iron was a diffused resource like timber, peat and grain. Even during the Renaissance, when mines supplied iron to the massed armies of Western Europe, iron was still extracted from bogs on the north of the continent, for example in the Novgorod republic. When supplies of bog iron were depleted as a result of the felling of the forests and the draining of the wetlands, metalworks moved further north and east. The main region for bog metal ores was the sparsely populated Olonets district, today’s Karelia – a quiet, distant corner of Russia, bordering Finland. Local blacksmiths performed wonders, and in the nineteenth century they forged bog iron that was close to the quality of steel. 25 Bog ore was also known in North America – some rails and ploughs were made of this cheap iron.