The Aim of Places for Making, Places for Taking. Metals in the Global Eighteenth Century has been to analyse the dynamics of change in the early modern period, and the ways in which change operated across space. Our approach has been concentrated to the field of metals, but contrary to much previous research, foremost dealing with the sphere of production, our project has taken a wider perspective. We have analysed the making of metals, but also its trading and consumption. We have also entered into the field of how metals became matters for scientific inquiries. Our empirical beginning was three different spatial entities, s.c. ‘contact zones’, where metals played an important role in shaping the process of change we often denounce as the emergence of modernity; we set out to study the bruk, the plantation and the trading factories along the African coast. These have later been supplemented with other significant locations, and we have added the library, the laboratory, workshops, the mine and the whaling ship. We have seen the latter as a kind of ‘floating plantation’. The research has been undertaken by Göran Rydén, Chris Evans, Linn Holmberg, Hedvig Widmalm and Måns Jansson.

Historical work is time consuming, and much time has been spent in archives; we have explored source material related to Europe, Africa, the Americas in archives in Sweden, Britain, France and the U.S., and accumulated new and previous unknown fact of the early modern world. We have begun to analyse this material, and have presented our findings at international conferences in Amsterdam, Røros, St. Thomas, Göttingen, Providence, etc; we have presented papers about equipping plantations with iron and copper, and the diverging metal trading patterns on ships going to Africa and ships heading for the Caribbean. We are organising a session at the Global History Conference in Budapest this autumn on global copper, with participants dealing with places for making, dealing and using copper in European and Asian settings. We have also expanded our research into new settings, and presently there are new research being done on copper, focusing on Falun, Røros and Swansea, funded by bodies like the Norwegian Research Council and the John Carter Brown Library. Another project has also been set up on the intellectual side of iron and steel making in Sweden.

We have not, yet, taken our results to arenas outside of the academic world, apart from a few occasions. Rydén was involved in a public debate about the Swedish society, past and present, and the transatlantic slave trade. Evans has appeared on the BBC in a program about eighteenth century steel in London.

We are now beginning to publish our results. Minor texts have appeared, but now two major studies have been accepted for publication. The first, by Evans and Rydén, deals with European iron being shipped to West Africa, so called Voyage Iron, to be used as barter in the slave trade. Previous research has dealt with African importation of Asian and European textiles. Our starting point is that metals made up only a fraction of goods brought to Africa, but that they still played a significant role in its general development and in the slave trade in particular. Contrary to textiles Voyage Iron fulfilled different functions in the African society, as both currency and producer goods. We argue that iron enhanced the agricultural expansion, as tools for clearing woodlands and make new lands available for cultivation; the influx of European iron must be viewed in relation to the Columbian exchange, with maize cultivation as a driving force for economic change and population growth. This study also deals with the complicated relationship between an African production of iron, which was on the rise during the early modern period, and imported European iron; the question of hybridity is discussed. This article has been accepted for publication by Past & Present.

A second text ready for publication is Jansson’s thesis, to be defended in early June. This study deals with the Swedish metal trades, and in particularly the making of cutlery, but it does so from a transnational perspective; this study shows, emphatically, that Sweden was economically and technologically integrated in a European setting. Previous scholars have treated early-modern Swedish metal ware production as a dead-end street, not related to modern industry. This thesis unravels a different pattern, and chronology, and depicts a more varied reality, where Swedish cutlers travelled in Europe learning about new ways of organising and making things. These ‘novelties’ were brought back to Sweden where their introduction was negotiated in a complicated structure, involving political, technological and economic features. An important aspect of this study is that it shows the importance of Stockholm as a crucial ‘contact zone’; the capital is viewed as a ‘metal bazaar’.

This is an international project, dealing as it does with global history, but also as it includes scholars from outside Sweden, and using archival materials from many different settings. The international aspect is also visible in the way we aim to mediate our results, with presentations at international conferences. This is also seen in the publication strategy that we have. The article for Past & Present is a case here: It aims at connecting the development on two continents, and is published in a highly respected journal with a wide readership. The same can be said about two other publications that we are presently working on. A first text is an analysis of Swedish Cameralism, linking the local development of a few bruk with what took place on the national level, including economic thoughts, around the concept of Hushållning. This study will be published in a volume that brings together a renewed discussion on eighteenth century economic thinking spanning the whole of Europe.

A second publication that we are working on, with the whole project as authors, is a study that loosely takes on the grand question of ‘What was Steel in the Early Modern Period?’ This question closely relates to our overall aim, of analysing societal change bridging the divide that previous research have inserted between Early Modernity, or Pre Modernity, and Modernity. In this text we tackle this from a ‘metallic’ viewpoint, and analyse how steel was made, traded, consumed, understood and negotiated in several of the ‘contact zones’ mentioned about; we take a beginning in the laboratories and libraries in Paris, switching to production at German Stahlbergen, English steel towns, before ending up in Sweden. A key figure is Sven Rinman who was involved in many aspects of steel, he constructed furnaces, conducted tests of steel in mines and in Stockholm and he wrote about the material. We end with a return to Paris and how steel was treated in the encyclopaedic tradition. This article will be submitted to a leading international journal in the summer. This theme might be expanded into a book.

An ultimate aim is also that Evans and Rydén should write a monograph. Such a book will address the main results from this project. We set out to analyse the dynamics of change in the early modern period, and the ways in which change operated across space. We took inspiration from the French historian Daniel Roche who has said that the main challenge for early-modern historians is to analyse change in a society that ‘saw itself as stable, changeless’. He also stressed that we need to understand and analyse history from both material and immaterial perspectives; it is all about how women and men ‘appropriate mental structures and cultural values in a permanent confrontation of economic and social horizons.’ Our most pertinent finding stems from such a way of thinking about historical development, as we have attempted to look for change close to people’s life, and not viewed from a macro perspective. In our Past & Present publication we have argued that the large influx of an apparently unexciting material, Voyage Iron, radically altered people’s (agricultural) everyday life, in that they could clear woodlands and expand the cultivation of maize. An outcome of that was a growing population, but also a growing trade with human cargo. Also in Jansson’s thesis do we find aspects of changes on the micro level that gradually modified the course of history. He has shown how Swedish civil servants, along with metal making artisans, travelled in Europe to discover how they made steel, cutlery, or other commodities. Contrary to much previous research he has analysed the complicated and complex route in which what they saw while travelling became ‘grounded’ in the Swedish society. It was hardly a one-way traffic, but rather a long process of ‘translation’ before Swedish metal making took on a new shape. From such a perspective it is hard to maintain a view with a sharp, revolutionary, divide between the early-modern world and what came after in the form of ‘modernity’.  

Another important result of this project is that metals is a very suitable ‘tool’ with which one can analyse historical development in a long perspective, and as such it might prove to be a bridge in the on-going discussions about the coming of modernity. During the last couple of decades historians have returned to the period which has been labelled as ‘the Age of Revolution’, the ‘Great Divergence’, etc., but they have mainly done so armed with questions related to the intellectual sphere or economic circumstances related to consumer patterns (textiles have been the fabric around which many narratives are constructed). Metals have a higher ‘analytical capacity’, in that it can serve as producer goods and currency along with being consumer goods. Metals were also important in the development of early-modern science. This is most clear from our discussion about steel, which is analysed from all these aspects.


In doing so, we deploy new perspectives on historical change, making use of the work of Daniel Roche, Michel de Certeau and William Sewell.
Our approach is wide-ranging. We are concerned with concrete processes (smelting, refining and fabrication), with questions of consumption (with how metal wares became integral to domestic life), and with how the making and trading of metal commodities posed intellectual questions.
Our approach is global, a response to recent scholarship that takes a transnational approach to the past. The potential for change in the early modern world arose from the intensifying contact between far-flung peoples – contacts that were often mediated through metallic things. Empirically, our project focuses on three ‘contact zones’ (bruk, plantations and factories) that linked the world of the Baltic with European colonies in the Americas and coastal trading places in Africa and India.