Resumen de Information and decision making: The logic of Spanish mining administration, 1675–1700

Peter Paul Marckhgott Sanabria

• 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