In the post-Baroque era, science in the developed states of Europe gradually turned from theological scepticism to practical goals. The growing interest in the search for new sources of wealth resulted in the policy of mercantilism that developed in European powers from the Baroque period to the 1830s; this policy directly affected the nature of scholarly research, and in non-colonial states, it focussed, in the form of cameralist system, on the development of state administration and the improvement in and exploitation of economically marginal or directly poor regions. In connection with the Enlightenment ideal of a harmonious society, states aimed at a functional normalisation of relations among individual social strata; the scholarly interest, in the primary pursuit of economic and developmental objectives, focusses for the first time on folk culture, providing valuable reports on it and, last but not least, contributing to the popularization of its selected segments, with which Romantic philosophy as well as anthropology subsequently worked; in the period under study, anthropology was rather a natural science dealing with human evolution, including related cultural expressions. The aforementioned factors brought about the first ethnographic monographs applying the theories and methods that formed the basic building blocks of the future independent discipline; the treatise observes their development up to a noticeable ideological breakthrough in the pre-March period.