ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mining the Nation: Mining, Visual Knowledge, and Nation Building in the 19th Century

• In Event: The Plural Worlds of Earth Science: Visual, Material, and Institutional Transformations Across Disciplines, Scales, and Territories 1

English Abstract

This paper examines how visual practices associated with mining and Earth sciences contributed to shaping understandings of national territory in the 19th century. It focuses on a diverse corpus of visual materials—engineers’ notebooks, technical drawings, illustrated treatises and popular science publications—taking as its point of departure the field notebooks produced in 1829 by French mining engineer Frédéric Le Play. Although conceived as a personal working tool, these notebooks show how geological observations, cross-sections, sketches of tools and depictions of mining landscapes formed part of a broader epistemology of territory rooted in the emerging industrial and technological state. Le Play’s later career reinforces this connection. Trained at the École des Mines, he became a prominent political figure under the Second Empire— state councilor, senator and central organiser of the 1867 Paris Exposition, a key event for strengthening the Nation’s image. His evolving visual and documentary practices, from technical sketches to sociological portraits of workers, exemplify how mining imagery mediated the relationship between labour, technology and the industrial nation. The growing discourse on mining labour, to which Le Play contributed (notably with Les ouvriers européens), shaped “the miner” as a European social figure, emblematic of industrial modernity. By analysing these materials alongside mining scenes circulating through world’s fairs, popular science journals and transnational iconographic traditions, the paper argues that mining visual culture provided powerful means for conceptualising the subsoil as a national resource and integrating it into socio-political discourses shaping the industrial state.

Author

• Maddalena Napolitani, Museo Galileo