The environmental humanities are currently paying sustained critical attention to mining, quarrying, drilling, deep-sea dredging and other ‘extractive’ economies. As this emerging body of scholarship has shown, activities like mining have not only played a crucial role in shaping human history and the fate of the planet. They are also entangled with views of nonhuman nature that demand urgent scrutiny, views often encapsulated in the term ‘extractivism’. This important new keyword for ecologically-oriented thinkers references both tangible acts of extraction – the removal from the earth and oceans of valuable fossil fuels, metals, minerals and similar assets – and a broader anthropocentric outlook, which sees the earth as a storehouse of natural resources that can be exploited for human ends.
Extractivism in this double sense is usually thought to have begun in the industrial nineteenth century. Yet extractivist ventures arguably have a longer history, one that can be traced back to the crucial period in early modernity when European powers began to expand into the Americas, Asia, Africa and, later, the Arctic. This was the moment when progress in shipbuilding, navigation, mining techniques and other forms of knowledge made possible the expropriation of precious raw materials from foreign centres to Europe, on a large scale for the first time.
Taking this longer view, our panel of short talks will offer a series of visual histories of early modern extractive enterprises. Delivered by historians of art and visual culture, the talks will engage with the visual dynamics of extraction as a material and political pursuit – one that brings to the surface previously-unseen natural materials, even as it pushes out of sight the ecological and societal costs involved in their acquisition.
This event held with the Warburg Institute is part of Art History Festival 2025 organised by the Association for Art History.
Image Credit: Herri met de Bles, The Coppermine, c.1540, oil on wood, 83 x 114cm (plus detail). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
