Studies of 18th century Bosnia have focused primarily on the its administration and (para)militarization, describing the region through the ‘border’ or ‘frontier’ paradigm as it relates to the violent imperial encounters of the period. And while militarization created movement and migration, the focus on local military elites, described as disconnected from Istanbul, has also emphasized a bounded, isolated character to this province. Often elided is the rich intellectual and textual production that emerged from a population persistently involved in the cross-imperial trade of metals and minerals despite the constant shifting of military lines. Of particular interest is the rise of historiographic genres that produced new conceptualizations of the relationship between the past, nature and self. In this paper, I will trace firstly, the emergence of a distinct Franciscan chronicling genre in 18th century Bosnia, looking both towards Vienna and Istanbul as imperial centers, and concerned with a disappearing silver trade; but also secondly, the archival practices that arose in Franciscan monasteries during this period. Most often situated along important trade routes and in old mining centres, Franciscan monasteries and Franciscans themselves became important collectors and curators of the mining industry’s legal and transactional documents, mineral samples, mining technology, but also miners’ bodies. Additionally they held the peculiar role of both patrons of mining but also brokers between officials, mining populations and foreign traders due to their authority with largely Catholic mining populations but also their extensive linguistic training and cultural knowledge. Franciscans could straddle differences easily in this large and world-scale economic activity. In this paper, I will examine one chronicle in particular—fra Filip Lastri?’s Commentariolum super Bosnensi provincia—and argue that Lastri?’s text opens up further questions about the relationship between industrial and intellectual production, and specifically about the impact of resource extraction and its derivate industries on writing and ideas about authorship. It is in this context of geological temporalities and proto-capitalist imperial economies that we begin to see the appearance of a distinct history writing that spatializes ‘Bosnia’ as a political entity through the configuration of its territory, people and natural resources. This re-conceptualization of the relationship between people, land and ores had consequences for the perception of the relationship between authorial selves and their social worlds, but also the perception of centre-periphery relations—especially in imagining how a privileged industrial labourer class was supposed to communicate with their officials across such a vast empire.