SCARCE will analyse thousands of archival documents about mining in proto-industrial (East) Central Europe, using automated text recognition and a new method based on historical epistemology. Mining is high-stakes case that sits squarely at the intersection of debates in the history of science and technology, social and economic history, and environmental history. In Central Europe, the sector entered a crisis around 1550, prompting the rise of specialized bureaucracies staffed with skilled scientists and expert workers. This provided a rare socioeconomic niche in which theoretical and practical knowledge interacted and merged. Through collaborations, SCARCE will establish how Central Europe compared with Iberian America, West Africa, and East Asia, and explore how metal-mining regions across the early modern world were increasingly entangled through trade and colonial extraction. This case, within its European and global entanglements, allows us to answer urgent questions across a range of fields: How did labour rationalization and joint ownership – building blocks of modern capitalism – emerge in locations outside of Atlantic commercial societies? How did administrative procedures (accounting, reporting) shape scientists/technicians’ understanding of natural processes? And how did the contradictions of extracting non-renewable resources shape modern sustainability thinking?