The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt has popularly and academically been studied for his outsized influence on American science and as an embodiment of a transcendent Romantic aesthetic, but Patrick Anthony’s Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers proposes substantially reappraising Humboldt and his scientific programs within the ascent of global capitalism in the early nineteenth century. Anthony convincingly demonstrates that the global scale of “Humboldtian science” was not cosmopolitan but rather arose to meet desires of extracting mineral wealth from various imperial frontiers.

Since Susan Faye Cannon’s classic formulation of “Humboldtian sciences” in Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, historians have often thought of Humboldt as an early progenitor of systemized knowledge about the natural world known through painstaking measurement. Historians of science and empire, particularly of the colonial Hispanic world, have further argued that Humboldt’s botanical collections and travel writings operated as part of imperial extension and the “reinvention” of the Americas for European colonization.

Anthony suggests that, in addition to Humboldtian sciences’ role in the professionalization of science and expansion of global empires, Humboldt’s particular “physique du monde” (global physics), which he describes as “a program of vast data collection and artful conjecture … in search of general laws of earth and environmental systems,” must be placed amid the transatlantic currents of early nineteenth-century global capitalism (p. 1). Specifically, Anthony incorporates concepts such as commodity frontiers from historians of capitalism such as Sven Beckert and Jason Moore to identify the “world-systemic process by which European capitalism enclosed the so-called ‘global countryside’ for bulk commodity production” (p. 4). Humboldt “invoked a putatively universal earth science to assure European capitalists of an infinite stock of global mineral wealth,” framing the relocation of extractive economies into colonies “as a matter of fact, a natural phenomenon” (p. 5). Paying attention to the “‘commodity work’ performed by globalizing sciences of earth and air in the early nineteenth century,” Anthony argues, “puts scientific practices (back) at the heart of histories of global capitalism” (p. 5).

Much of Anthony’s assessment of how Humboldtian sciences enclosed the globe comes from close attention to what Staffan Müller-Wille called “paper tools” (p. 20). Maps, tableaus, and treatises created a global “information order” that allowed knowledge to circulate within and between empires (p. 23). Humboldt enthusiastically adopted a Betriebs-Tableau (“operational-tableau”) that one of his subordinates developed, which recorded workers, architecture, and ore veins alike. Because Humboldt was not always present at the mines, the “tabular system” became a way of “governing at a distance” by standardizing reports that Humboldt would return with marginalia (p. 34). Creating and interpreting tableaus and other paper tools such as cross-sectional diagrams became a centerpiece of the curriculum at Prussian mining schools, and Humboldt “imported” this technology, developed in the peripheries of Prussia, to map the mines of colonial Mexico and Siberia alike (p. 49).

Tableaus and maps support another axis of Anthony’s project of using the “vertical [as] both topic and method” (p. 8). Drawing on the work of geographers such as Eyal Weizman and Bruce Braun, Anthony shows that Humboldt and other imperial agents subscribed to an “equation between controlling vertical territory and knowing vertical nature” (p. 10). Humboldt’s Essai politique argued that “the science of elevation—called hypsometry—was a critical metric for sciences of the state,” and that a country’s “topography influences the ‘wealth of nations’” (p. 85). In the cordilleras of Mexico, this logic led Humboldt’s survey to create a “racialized tableau” that “assigned elevational zones to people as well as plants” based on their use of natural resources, and the maps and atlases suggested new ways for Europeans to “transform and reorganize vertical space” through mining or agriculture (pp. 89 and 102).

Anthony’s attention to the vertical allows for one of his particularly novel insights that the “underground [was] a key site of atmospheric science” and suggests the need for a “history of combined sciences of earth and air” (p. 51). Anthony shows that Humboldt’s work surveying mines and developing breathing masks for miners, for example, developed in response to the dangers of “striking weather” in certain mines (p. 53). Further, Anthony argues that miners first developed knowledge of both climate and earth, not managers and gentleman scientists like Humboldt, and the latter relied upon that laboring epistemology to formulate his broader scientific program (p. 53).

Air and earth sciences were further conjoined into a “geo-atmospherics of empire” in the Kazakh steppe, where Humboldt and other Prussian scientists relied upon a network of prisons, mines, and eventually meteorological stations to collect data for incorporation into their global sciences of mountains and climate (p. 129). As environmental historians such as Diana Davis have noted in other arid climates, earth and air sciences “orientalized” the climate and geography of the steppe as excessive and mismanaged, giving a natural basis to Russian colonization of the region: “Asian meteorology … became the measure of the empire’s ‘combat’ against aridity” (pp. 138–9).

Unearthed commendably introduces new and productive modes for situating the social, political, and racial economies of Humboldt’s scientific knowledge. Foregrounding mining as the heart of Humboldt’s science—rather than an aberration in an otherwise aesthetic or cosmopolitan program—centers technical and experiential knowledge in global earth sciences in ways that answer the need for a labor history of extractivism and admits enserfed, enslaved, Indigenous, and Creole knowledge into histories of physical sciences (p. 53).

Anthony’s sustained references to Humboldt’s reliance on often-marginalized producers of knowledge help to avoid idolizing Humboldt, but these acknowledgments do not always convey how highly contingent and flexible racial, ethnic, and class categories likely were, as the 2022 volume The Invention of Humboldt: On the Geopolitics of Knowledge (edited by Mark Thurner and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra) explores in greater detail. Further enunciation of those processes might have bolstered the book’s framing of “global asymmetries” and “class- and race-based inequalities in land ownership and capital accumulation,” and it might have offered opportunities to enrich comparisons between the discrete geographies (pp. 3, 7). Unearthed provides a timely reexamination of how imbricated modern, global sciences have been with capitalism, empire, race, and class and signals many future avenues of study.