Information and Decision Making: The Logic of Spanish Mining Administration, 1675–1700

Abstract

During the late seventeenth century, the Consejo de Hacienda, the central administrative institution charged with governing the Spanish public mining sector, strived to gain extensive information on mining-related topics. The knowledge base created in this way was not a product of an illustrated, merely encyclopaedic interest, nor expression of a supposed “monarchy of paper”, where copious amounts of reports on any conceivable topic were produced to little effect. This chapter will show (1) that such a knowledge base was crucial in enabling a closer control over publicly owned mines as demanded by the monarch Charles II, and (2) that the Consejo de Hacienda disposed of an array of complementary instruments for acquiring mining-related knowledge.