Often overlooked in discussions of the recent war in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the peculiarity of one of its concentration camps: Omarska camp was created in southeastern Europe’s richest iron mine, by the mine’s own employees. Many of the employees’ technical skills (knowledge of organic compounds, terrain, ability to operate machinery) as well as social networks (kin and colleague relations) were put to use in the location, concentration and execution of prisoners, the creation of mass graves, and the disintegration and disarticulation of human remains. Some of northwestern Bosnia’s most well-regarded citizens, industrial elites and middle-class labourers ran this camp and were also imprisoned within it. Miners’ participation in this violence certainly needs to be located within the ethos of the production process and miners’ training, as well as the larger political processes of the late 20th century. However, the usage of older mining knowledges and established genealogical and social structures to sustain acts of violence indicates an alternative analytic path than one suggested by referring to an opportunistic ethnonationalist labour class or the concurrent construction of atavism by regional politicians. This paper suggests that the contemporary moment cannot be divorced from either a longer historical perspective on the region or the varieties of cosmopolitan sociality that have emerged in this transregional extractive space. The centuries-old Balkan mining industry, sustained by the incessant departures and arrivals of labourers and investors, has carved out this space differently that previously imagined. These extractive mobilities – sometimes individual, sometimes family-based and sometimes imperial – have created and reproduced industrial structures, classes and their possibilities relentlessly. Fanning outwards from sites of extraction, one finds archival evidence of the rich geographical and temporal span of family networks of mining elites that often collaborated with religious and political officials from various imperial centres in order to sustain their livelihood. They inevitably influenced the shape of regional politics in remarkable, enduring ways. This paper will especially focus on the historical formation of metals as an idiom through which people understand themselves, their relations to others, to governors and to land and earth, in times of plenty and in times of depletion. Drawing on historiographic, auto/biographic, financial and religious texts from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, this paper suggests that the proto-capitalist imperial economies of the period provided fertile ground for the emergence of a Balkan personhood distinctly understood through the configuration of territory, people and natural resources.