En bergsmans rön och försök i ryska riket : Nationella bilder och statsrelaterad kunskap i Daniel Tilas 1738 års studieresa

Sammanfattning: On February 4th in 1738, Daniel Tilas, an official of the Swedish Bureau of Mines travelled into Russia in order to study the metal and mining industries of the country. After just over two months of travelling between workshops, factories and mines, both abandoned and active ones, he returned home to Sweden with a rather rich description of his findings in Russia. During the early modern era travels like this one, namely with the purpose of gathering and describing knowledge, were a commonplace occurrence all over Europe. The Bureau of Mines sponsored many travels of this sort during it’s roughly 200-year existence in order to gain knowledge of the state of the metal and mining industries around Europe and even in Sweden, these travels also functioned as a crucial part in the education of the Swedish mining officials. But the Swedish travels to Russia were undertaken with partially different goals in mind, since the end of the great northern war Russia hade become the primary enemy on Sweden. This meant the Bureau of Mines sought after knowledge about and from Russia which could be used to effectively compete against them on a geopolitical scale. In this essay I thus attempt to explore the view of Russia which existed in the Bureau of Mines during the first half of the 18th century by primarily studying how Tilas depicted the Russian mining and metal industries and secondarily the Russian society in his writings. I do this through the analytical lens of the theory on “state-related knowledge” defined by historians Lothar Schilling and Jakob Vogel. I also make use of the concept of the “hybrid expert” as defined by historian Ursula Klein to deepen the analysis of Tilas depiction and description of Russia’s industry.