The Pursuit of Metals and the Ideology of Improvement in Early Modern Sápmi, Sweden
The article examines the ideology of improvement in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mining in northern Sweden in the province of Sápmi. It discusses how the rhetoric of improvement and “civilizing” projects were intertwined with the mining enterprises; how they informed the regulatory and disciplinary ordinances issued for the region; and how the ideas of reform, discipline, and