Unearthing Migrants in the History of Technology and Skill

In studying the role of migrants in the circulation of technologies in the early modern period historians are often presented with particular methodological challenges. First, there are few written sources from migrant artisans, skilled workers, experts, workmen, and soldiers and sailors themselves concerning their forms of practice.Footnote ⁴ Not only were these actors not necessarily literate, but some of those that were would have likely destroyed their professional and personal records in order to ensure ownership over some of their knowledge.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, much of the skill and knowledge possessed by these diverse migrants was embodied and passed down orally.Footnote ⁶ The scarcity of primary, written sources is even more apparent while looking at case studies outside of Europe, as in the Pacific World or the African continent. Additionally, migrants, as often subaltern groups, were frequently absent from and written out of official documentation, or had their stories distorted. Migrants were often not identified as such, but as traders, vagrants, or pirates; non-Europeans or women would be likely erased from historical narrative, described as passive, or reduced to unskilled workers, in particular in the colonial context.Footnote ⁷ The contributors to this issue have therefore read along the archival grain of sources, such as court archives, enslaved people’s petitions, colonial reports, illustrations, or hospital records, and drawn upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies to unearth on-the-ground processes of technological dialogue and innovation.Footnote ⁸

The second difficulty lies in the tension between micro and macro approaches. Studying the role of migrants in technological innovation leads us to explore the networks and global connections through migrant trajectories. However, the technological practice is deeply rooted in the local; it takes place within the home, on the street, behind the closed doors of the workshop, and the construction yard. This is because, whilst the people centred in these case studies are often mainly defined by their movement, it is important to remember that the exchanges of knowledge and skill took place in situ.

To deal with these tensions, most of the contributions in this special issue place themselves within a recent historiographical trend combining global circulations with individual biographies: global micro-history.Footnote ⁹ Whilst the focus of global history has often been on models of globalisation, trade networks, and official relations, this more recent trend centres the diverse roles of individuals and “populat[es] models and theories with real people.”Footnote ¹⁰ We therefore apply this approach to migrants and their experiences in order to identify common processes that facilitated the migration-innovation nexus, and examine what moving stories can tell us about something other than movement.Footnote ¹¹ By applying these approaches, we can highlight the on-the-ground productive processes in these moments of encounter; processes that took place within a variety of contexts but exhibit common factors that led to innovation.

Early Modern Skill and Technology

This special issue focuses on the period from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth century, often broadly referred to as “early modern.” We recognise the difficulties in defining and delineating a period that would encompass in a single framework the complexities of the world.Footnote ¹² We therefore define early modern, not in terms of chronology, but as a period of shared experiences, which took place globally though often at different periods and in different ways. It is therefore a period of transitions and revolutions, delimited by the integration of almost all societies to a common global market, ending with the prevalence of fossil-fuelled societies and Western colonisation.Footnote ¹³ This period was defined by the formation of overseas empires, the development of diverse governance models, the emergence of transnational and transregional institutions and trading enterprises, the global intersection of technological innovation, and shifting migration patterns. This special issue has gathered articles which focus on the last two of these factors through a focus on the migration-innovation nexus.

The first of these, the global intersection of technological innovation, has been extensively studied.Footnote ¹⁴ From market success and failures to domestic policies and institutions, and from particular knowledge regimes to the politics of external threat, the drivers of successful technological innovation have been variously identified in recent decades.Footnote ¹⁵ Such approaches have often been premised on a teleological and macro-centred understanding of innovation. In the past decades, such interpretations have been challenged, as it has been shown that innovation rarely occurs as a singular event or eureka moment in the form of discoveries, claims, or patents, and it is therefore necessary to refocus the issue on “use” by looking at the practical application of technological skill and knowledge.Footnote ¹⁶ Technological innovation and dialogue include numerous practices such as maintenance, repair, imitation, copying, and reverse engineering, and encompass various forms of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁷ Innovation therefore does not simply occur in places of learning or in the mind of “great men” but stems from the everyday creative interaction between crafter and material.Footnote ¹⁸ Within these interactions, crafters are reliant on embodied skills rather than any codified knowledge. These embodied skills are often overlooked, but allow people to perform difficult tasks with ease in the experience of the everyday, and allow artisans to practice their arts.Footnote ¹⁹

Focusing on the human element—the artisan—and their embodied skills allows us to recentre the analysis on the individuals or groups who possess the expertise and practices that drive technological innovation.Footnote ²⁰ Many of these actors or groups were highly mobile, which brings us to a second key factor: shifting migration patterns. As “knowledge is now understood to be constituted in part by movement,” both of and by the body, there is an increased need to integrate migrants, their movements, and their activities as a vital component of innovation.Footnote ²¹

Taking as an analytical category the figure of the migrant to understand technological change allows us to show that technologies were inextricably parts of networks of exchange, materiality, institutional organisation, and other attendant factors, forming matrices rather than singular, individual strands, thereby recognising the crucial role of micro-adaptations, communities of practice, interactions, and wider social and environmental networks.Footnote ²² It is through this focus on everyday, useful, embodied knowledge that we can see the importance of migrant agency and integrate them and their wider activities as a vital component of technological and knowledge circulations.Footnote ²³

What we show with this wide chronological range of case studies is that the processes driving and driven by the migration-innovation nexus remain the same in a time before the advent of a “modern” world and the active differentiation between science and craft.Footnote ²⁴ Much of what we now consider science was in fact rooted in artisanal practice or guided by “artisanal epistemology.”Footnote ²⁵ Within this reframing, technology is not simply transferred from one place or person to another, but is rather an inherently multidirectional, technological dialogue.Footnote ²⁶ What drives technological change is not merely the circulation of technology itself, but the “friction”—here understood as the productive interaction between migrant skills and new political, social, environmental, and cultural contexts—through which technologies are adapted, improvised, or transformed in motion.Footnote ²⁷

Early Modern Migration

Compared to the large-scale migration of the twentieth century, migration during the early modern period was characterised by a comparatively limited movement of people.Footnote ²⁸ However, migrants played a major role in the long-distance circulation of technologies, as human movement was, and often remains, the most effective way for knowledge, skill, and techniques to travel and circulate.Footnote ²⁹ Broadly understood as the movement of individuals or groups and their settlement in a given territory, whether forced or deliberate, for substantial periods of time,Footnote ³⁰ migration is crucial to such processes of innovation, circulation, and dialogue.Footnote ³¹ Much in the way that literacy studies has increasingly acknowledged the need to study not only the highly literate, the history of technology too has opened the field to non-experts as vital for technological innovation.Footnote ³² This therefore not only encompasses the movement and activities of so-called experts but also takes into account the productive movement of any individual or groups who contributed to technological dialogue through their experience of migration. In this special issue we therefore combine the influences of a wide variety of actors: from Caribbean enslaved people to Mandinka roofers, and from Dutch refiners and second-generation Huguenot glass workers to Japanese smugglers.

The history of technologies has therefore increasingly acknowledged the important role of circulations, not only within Europe and between Europe and “the rest” of the world, but especially outside Europe.Footnote ³³ More broadly, much work has been done on migration, and more recently major contributions have examined the long history of migration from a global perspective, from the early modern to modern periods.Footnote ³⁴ Through this literature, the drivers and motivations of migration have been shown to be numerous:Footnote ³⁵ from the independent movement of migrants to state-encouraged migration, from forced migrations to refugees, and organizational migration.Footnote ³⁶

The categories and experiences through which migrants moved were varied and fluid, and therefore need to be critically assessed, in particular because of the relative silence of their voices in the documentation. How did these migrants refer to or identify themselves? What terms, such as “artisan” and “master,” were meaningful to the particular contexts in which they worked? Who applied such labels and why? The case studies presented here explore such questions by examining groups and individuals who adapted or changed categories over the course of their lifetimes. Indeed, as has been widely demonstrated, migrant communities themselves are subject to constant change, be they sojourner or diasporic communities, or “integrated” into their host environment.Footnote ³⁷

To understand these shifting, dynamic, and diverse experiences and practices of migrants in the early modern period, it is necessary to examine not only direct accounts and contexts of their skilled work but also their wider social lives. Contributors to this special issue have therefore drawn upon traces of matrimonial alliances, family trajectories, training and formation, entrepreneurial strategies, and non-professional skills in order to understand how knowledge and techniques have spanned individual and familial life courses and to reinscribe migrant agency. In doing so they explore, for example, whether second- and third-generation migrants in England and Scotland were identified, or self-identified, as migrants; whether enslaved people in Jamaica were able to actually benefit from their skills; and in what ways networks and institutions, whether based around religious institution, place, “ethnicity,” or family, such as Chinese migrant networks across southeast Asia, acted as drivers and conduits of migration and the exchange of ideas, skill, and knowledge. Within such processes, however, how does one distinguish between success and failure, and who is the judge of such assessments? Even seemingly perfect conditions for the circulation of technological knowledge and skill could see enterprises fail. One of the key abilities of migrants was therefore to adapt their skills and/or knowledge to their new environments. This could take many forms and spanned adaptations to raw materials, social hierarchies, markets, tools, and practices.

Migrants, Authority, and Agency

What is also shown by each contribution in this special issue is that it is vital to attend to the relation between local, national, and global politics and the migration of skilled workers. Specifically, many of the articles examine the central role political authorities played in facilitating or impeding human mobilities, and the impact this had on the circulation of technologies. From 1500 to 1900, these politics were influenced by a multitude of actors involved in various form of organisations, such as cities, states, empires, and colonial powers. In particular, empires often promoted, enforced, and controlled the movement of people between different parts of the world.Footnote ³⁸ Vast maritime and land empires such as that of the Portuguese, Spanish, Ottomans, Bornoans, Chinese, or French were therefore very much concerned with controlling mobilities and managing workforces.Footnote ³⁹ With the rise of modern colonial empires, this control intensified and mobility became increasingly intra-imperial. Many attempts were made to bring experts from both the “metropole” and “periphery” to particular colonised regions in order to increase extraction and promote productivity.Footnote ⁴⁰

Not only did rulers use coercion in their attempts to obtain skilled individuals and knowledge, but numerous states conversely provided sponsorship and rewards for those willing and able to migrate with their skills in order to set up and support certain industries or reform their military organisation.Footnote ⁴¹ In places such as Africa and Asia, as much as in Europe, rulers relied on migrant entrepreneurs.Footnote ⁴² Whilst some of these entrepreneurs had certain skills and technical knowledge themselves, others were able to organise the migration of skilled workers, be it within the borders of a political entity or across the borders of countries and empires.Footnote ⁴³ In these contexts, political authorities often actively encouraged the transmission of skills and knowledge from migrants to local workers.

Despite the interests and involvement of authorities, however, the circulation of some technologies circumvented state or colonial control. The agency of migrants was central to the processes of technological dialogue and innovation. Migrants tried to keep their market advantage by avoiding state involvement and therefore limiting the diffusion of their skills, or looked after new markets, by passing the authorities’ control through smuggling or non-authorised migration.Footnote ⁴⁴ Conversely, imperial, colonial, and state authorities also put measures in place themselves to block technological circulation, regulate mobilities, and counter the smuggling and selling of material, knowledge, and people. The arrival of new skills and techniques in a given context could therefore create diverse relations and tensions between local economic actors, commercial and artisanal institutions, and political authorities.

Born out of a conference as part of the UKRI-FLF project “Migration, Adaptation, Innovation: 1500–1800” led by Felicia Gottmann at Northumbria University, this volume builds on recent work in migration studies and science and technology studies to unearth the factors that allowed for migrants to become integral parts of technological dialogue. By bringing together historians with different geographical expertise, the aim of this volume is therefore to highlight the common processes in the migration-innovation nexus across the early modern world.

Contributions

In “Genoese Migration and Technological Transfer in the Early-Modern Spanish Monarchy,” Catia Brilli examines the role of Genoese workers and entrepreneurs in the development of different manufacturing sectors in the early-modern Spanish monarchy. Through a comparison between migrants who settled in the cities of Cadiz and Buenos Aires, this work demonstrates that the institutions of the Spanish Crown tended to encourage immigration of foreigners, especially those who practiced craft, retail, or mechanic professions. Through a consideration of the institutional framework and socio-economic conditions of the host societies in the Spanish peninsula and in the Spanish Americas, Brilli assesses the different contribution of Genoese migrants to the productive system of the Spanish monarchy. In doing so, this article shows that the particular social conditions and state policies in these two cities necessitated different strategies and adaptations for migrant settlers.

The relation between state and migrant is also extensively explored in Nicholas McGee’s “Networks vs. the State or ‘All Under Heaven’?: Chinese Migrants, Technology Transfer, and Early Modern Qing Empire.” By focusing on the interactions between migrants and the Qing state, it shows that the Qing state repeatedly found it necessary to concede autonomy and authority to migrant networks to make its own border system function. In doing so, McGee demonstrates the important impact that these interactions had on shipbuilding techniques in Siam, and mining and cash crop technologies throughout Southeast Asia. This contribution therefore highlights that the Qing Dynasty came to accommodate for these migrants within its expanding visions of universal emperorship, and that state efforts to regulate shipping, taxation, and even attire had both promoting and inhibiting impacts on the application of migrant skill.

In Massimo Bomboni’s “Sugar, Salt, and Mills for the Grand Duke: Dutch Trade and Technological Innovation in Early Seventeenth-Century Livorno,” we see an example of active state support in order to attract skilled migrants. By examining the role of Dutch entrepreneurship in the development of the port of Livorno in the early seventeenth century, Bomboni shows that favourable laws enticed foreigners from all over Europe and beyond to settle, work, and trade in Livorno. Through the analysis of three case studies, Bomboni shows the ways in which early modern merchants acted as international entrepreneurs and promoters of the diffusion of new technologies and new goods between distant markets. What this study highlights, however, is that such state support does not necessarily guarantee longevity of migrant ventures and that wider social, economic, and political circumstances can determine success or failure.

The impact of wider circumstances on the application of migrant knowledge and the adaptations that are required is further explored in Thomas Monaghan’s ‘The Diffusion of Sugar-Making Knowledge in the East China Sea: Japan, Amami, and Ryukyu, 1609–1868’ explores how sugar technology – both the know-how of cultivating sugarcane and the technical process of converting it into sugar crystals – reached and spread throughout early modern Japan. In doing so Monaghan highlights the centrality of Satsuma domain, which was able to take advantage of Chinese agricultural knowledge and technological micro-revolutions from the Ryukyu Kingdom through its control of the Amami islands in the 1690s. Through a comparison between the vast differences between the creation and characteristics of sugar production in Satsuma (where this created almost colonial relations) and Shikoku (where state support drove the creation of industry), Monaghan demonstrates the importance of official support and attendant factors on the creation of industry and the transfer of knowledge.

The article “Building and Developing Western-Style Cities: The Influence of European Architecture and Urban Planning in Senegambia, 1659–1854” by Cheikh Sene further explores these issues within the context of Senegambia. By taking a longue-durée approach, Sene shows how different colonial actors played a role in the circulation of architectural technology in the region. Significantly, Sene illustrates that the gradual process of urban transformation in the towns of Goreé and Saint-Louis resulted from a hybridisation of techniques that integrated European architectural styles and urban planning principles with local environmental and material constraints, facilitated through the collaboration of European architects and African masons. In doing so, this chapter analyses the success and limits of the technical contribution of European entrepreneurs on the economic, political, and cultural evolution of Senegambian societies, showing that the active importation of knowledge and skill by the colonial powers did not assure success. Central, therefore, are the importance of the inherently multidirectional nature of technological dialogue, and the consideration of on-the-ground factors.

Graham Kerr’s “The ‘King’s Negros’: Enslaved Workers in Royal Navy Yards in the Eighteenth Century” further explores the circulation of knowledge within the unequal context of empire through a focus on the intersection of technological dialogue and enslavement. This paper looks at the activities of a particular group of enslaved people in British naval yards and focuses on which skills were taught, what knowledge was shared, and who benefitted from such transfers. Starting with the 1730s plan by the Royal Navy in Jamaica to train enslaved people in shipyard activities, this paper highlights the circulation of knowledge and skill that occurred globally at sea and in yards of the British Navy. This paper therefore explores the value and importance of skill and knowledge for those in bondage through assessing how they were able to leverage their position as skilled workers by looking at their living and working conditions within the naval yard.

This focus on the workshop floor, though under very different conditions, is continued in Oliver Gunning’s article, “Migrant Innovation: The Movement of Glass-Making Knowledge in Early Modern Britain,” as this paper takes us to a consideration of migrant skill and knowledge in the context of glass-making in the British Isles. Between 1560 and 1800, many skilled glass-workers migrated from Europe to the British Isles with the goal of producing new consumer products. Though they brought with them new techniques, tools, and management processes, they were forced to adapt those to their new surroundings. By examining exactly how these skilled workers arrived in the British Isles and the role of entrepreneurs in facilitating the transfer of their knowledge, Gunning demonstrates that the application of migrant skill creates innovation by applying existing processes to new material, social, and political circumstances.

Lastly, Takahiro Yamamoto’s contribution, “Japanese Settlers’ Introduction of Dynamite to Truk in the 1890s,” also highlights the micro-interactions that constituted the circulation of technology. Through a focus on the illicit activity that took place on the borders of empire, this article shows the relations between the Japanese introduction of dynamite to the Pacific Island of Truk (now Chuuk) and wider global flows of this then new explosive. By centring this new explosive technology, Yamamoto shows how the sale of dynamite to Truk islanders resulted in its unforeseen use for dynamite fishing and intercommunal conflicts. This article therefore reveals how migrant entrepreneurship could be conditioned by global flows of technology and how illicit entrepreneurial activities of a handful of Japanese had far-reaching effects on the adaptation and implementation of new materials in the Pacific.

Together these eight pieces therefore foreground the importance of migrants in the circulation of skill and knowledge throughout the early modern world. By taking a global micro-historical approach, this special issue shows not simply that migrants were important in such processes, but how the circulation of technological knowledge and skill actually took place on the ground. By putting these articles together, it becomes possible to ascertain the conditions and circumstances that allowed for the effective circulation of technology and skill as well as pinpoint issues that obstructed both circulation and the success of migrants themselves.