Cultural 'improvement', discipline and mining in early modern Sapmi

This paper explores overlapping of economy and politics with ideology in 17th-century northern Sweden. Focusing on silver mining conducted in Sapmi (Lapland), the paper investigates the rhetoric of mines as arenas of moral and cultural improvement, the ways this rhetoric was expressed and aided by material culture and the ways the civilizing projects were contested by the indigenous Sami, towards whom many of these policies were directed. The analysis is set in a wider context of the 17th-century concept of political economy, state policies aiming at a better incorporation of Sapmi into the mainstream economy and culture of Sweden and informed by Foucauldian perspectives on governmentality and its spatial dimensions.