Europa mineraria: Circolazione delle élites e trasferimento tecnologico (secoli XVIII–XIX) (review)

In its different incarnations, globalization has been accompanied by the rise of a new breed of technocrats who have made competence the basis of their legitimacy, above and beyond the presence of a political mandate to govern the public sphere. Technocracy is not, however, a modern-day invention. Quite the contrary, technoscientific elites have played a key role in the evolution of the bureaucratic and administrative apparatus of the modern state, in particular around the time of the first Industrial Revolution.

In this well-researched book, Donata Brianta of the Università degli Studi di Pavia contributes to the burgeoning literature on the role of talent circulation as a key mechanism of technological transfer. In particular, the book focuses on the mobility of mining and metallurgic elites and their relationships with industrialization policies in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe. Brianta’s main argument is that this technocratic model finds its cultural and institutional roots in Continental Europe, in particular in France and Germany, where the mining industry lived through a renaissance beginning in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is in this context and thanks to human mobility that mining schools became the node of scientific communication. Brianta documents how this took two forms: the theories taught in the local schools to students and apprentices from all over the Continent and the periods spent traveling in stages and formative journeys. The importance of these journeys and the memory thereof is rightly underlined: there are more than 1,000 travel books in Paris’s École des mines.

Brianta develops her arguments in three chapters, some of them already published as journal articles but here revised and rendered more homogeneous in order to make this a well-articulated monograph. The common theme is human mobility and the relationship between technical culture, the mining industry, and public policies. Brianta first describes the history of the industry and its peculiarities, then moves on to the micro-history of its actors and their travels. The government played a crucial role by trying to attract the most talented professors and teachers and offering them rich incentives, including monopoly rights and the associated rents. Having the best universities and mining schools served to build international competitiveness, but required long-term strategies and considerable diplomatic acumen.

Some Italian states in which rulers were fascinated by innovation but also showed considerable political realism thought strategically about where to send students to learn and specialize, aiming to make the best use of this talent when it returned to the home country. The idea, in today’s language, was to turn the brain drain into win-win talent circulation. Where such conditions were in place, the technicians who had studied in the best foreign schools and visited the most advanced mining districts could adapt this knowledge and contribute to the local economy. More than 200 Italians took part in this international mobility, acquired useful knowledge, and built strategic links into international networks. This model, mediated by Piedmont and the Savoys, would eventually play a key role in the modernization of Italy following the 1861 Unification.

Sometimes the text is so rich in information, names, and details that it is difficult to follow the actors’ strategies and the author’s arguments. Nevertheless, Europa mineraria is an important contribution to the history of technology in Europe, and to the debate on the contribution of human mobility to technological transfer. Brianta has done much to further our understanding of the functioning of international knowledge centers in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Her premature death in 2009 will be much regretted.