Sebastian Felten (PhD, King’s College London) is a historian of science, finance, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. He is Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (MPIWG) between 2015 and 2018. He is PI of the ERC STG Project "Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resource Extraction in Central Europe, 1550-1850" (SCARCE, 2023-2028).

A collective volume on Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, which is the result of a working group at the MPIWG (co-convened with Christine von Oertzen), was published in December 2020.

Recent single-authored publications include papers on Enlightenment ergonomics, distributed cognition in early modern mines; the revival of early modern mining culture during the Nazis' war effort, and bureaucratic rationality. Open-access versions of my published work can be found on https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/.

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8194-4112

His current research explores knowledge about nature through a focus on mineral resources as they featured in metallurgy, mineralogy, economics, and ergonomics. He has studied commerce and bureaucracy using the tools of historical epistemology to build bridges between the history of science and social, cultural and economic history. His objective for the next years is to apply this integrated approach to understand the peculiar rationality of early modern resource extraction in Central Europe, which was often highly contradictory. In caring for workers, officials and experts rationalised harm; in seeing to the financial viability of mines, they curtailed profits; in setting up self-sustaining mining operations, they externalised risks to local communities who competed for water and access to forests; in producing authoritative knowledge about mining they made its adverse effects less visible. While this state-centred system was dismantled during liberal reforms in the 1850s, its culture of extraction survived. Engineers and administrative experts adopted this culture during their training at Central European mining academies before going on to work for private companies during the age of globalising industrial capitalism from 1850 onwards.

ERC Starting Grant "Sustained Concerns: Administration of Mineral Resource Extraction in Central Europe, 1550-1850" (SCARCE, 2023-2028)

The extraction of mineral resources has sharply increased over the past hundred years, and the ongoing transition to “green energy” is driving demand for minerals such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt. SCARCE provides a critical history of today's stakeholder conflicts by showing how contradictory principles of resource management – economic development, sustainability, and technological innovation – were forged in proto-industrial settings. It explores alternative, historical ways of provisioning for communities, making them available for current debates on environmental degradation and climate emergency.

Project Homepage: https://scarce.univie.ac.at/ 

Preliminary studies for this project have appeared in the Journal for the History of Knowledge,  WerkstattGeschichte,  History of Science, and Renaissance Studies.

First book: Money in the Dutch Republic: Everyday Practice and Circuits of Exchange (March 2022)

This book focuses on chemical and mathematical practices to tell a new history of money in the early modern world, written from the viewpoint of the Dutch Republic. It depicts farming communities in interaction with urban elites and describes how peasants and craftsmen, stewards and churchmen, metallurgists and officials fashioned objects into money and kept them in circulation. The book’s narrative picks up at the apogee of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, when the country was a major centre in the European world-system and when hundreds of different monies were used alongside each other. It concludes at a point when most of this plurality had been replaced by more uniform national currency in the nineteenth century. The book argues that mundane acts of scrutiny generated and sustained money’s ability to be exchanged for something else across time, space, and social divides. Mints, banks, professionals but also ‘ordinary users’ such as peasants or labourers forged links between matter and value by creating evidence about objects and by circulating or accepting this information. They could also undo these links by voicing doubts and refusing other people’s evidence. Objects then lost their ability to act as money. The book shows how over time links between matter and value were made more durable through increasing attention to the material properties of money objects and how, paradoxically, this made it more plausible to think of money in immaterial terms. The rationalisation of early modern monies into national currency was pursued by state officials, patriotic economists, and financial experts at political centres, and it ultimately diminished the role that users played in the maintenance of the system.

Introduction can be accessed here: https://uscholar.univie.ac.at/detail/o:1676773

Chapter 1 can be accessed here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/money-in-the-dutch-republic/1597F40C3D62B07D897266C3E22C9E26

A part of the book's argument can be found in this chapter on coins as objects of inquiry.

Recent collective volume: Queer Vienna: Knowledge and Counter-Knowledge in an Emancipatory Archive

Important achievements of the LGBTQ movements against bad or ill-used science have been rolled back or questioned across Europe. To counter these tendencies, this research and writing workshop will ask: What tools, sites, forms of communication, and technologies constitute the counter-knowledge that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer people have developed to understand themselves and communicate to others?

Students at the University of Vienna will conducted archival research at QWIEN Centre for Queer History Vienna and published their findings in the international open-access journal Æther. 

The project was supported by the Zukunftsfonds of the Republic of Austria, the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna and the Forschungsschwerpunkt Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

Curriculum Vitae

Research

Professional Service

Publications