This research project focused on the development of a new type of scientifically educated functional elites. It connected questions from the areas of history of science (mining sciences), the history of teaching institutions (mining academy), the history of administration (Theresian reforms), and the history of professions. The questions were framed by two crucial assumptions:
- that the educational project that led to the formation of a corps of mining engineers was at the same time a part of administrative and economic reforms leading to a new configuration of bonds between state, economy, and science, and became characteristic for the modern era
- the status of this new group of experts was substantially predicated by the new emerging corpora of the scientific, technological, and cameralist knowledge of the time between 1750 and 1850
A comparative project on the territory of Saxony was also undertaken at the TU Bergakademie Freiberg.