About — Migration, Adaption, Innovation

ABOUT THE PROJECT

Migration, Adaptation, Innovation:
1500-1800

Summary

‘Migration, Adaptation, Innovation: 1500-1800’ is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship Project led by Dr. Felicia Gottmann, associate professor at Northumbria University. The project will run between 2021 and 2025. The project team consists of two Postdoctoral Research Fellows, Dr. Floris van Swet and Dr. Rémi Dewière, and a PhD student, Oliver Gunning. A second PhD student, June Watson, is an associate member.

This project offers the first globally comparative study of skilled migration covering the origins of industrialisation and modern economic growth. Combining interdisciplinary methods (economic history, science and technology studies, material culture, and migration studies) with a globally comparative approach, this project will transcend the local and situation specific to identify the mechanisms underpinning the success and failure both of the integration of the migrant and the adaptation and diffusion of his or her skills and outputs in the past, allowing us to draw important parallels with, contrasts to, and guidelines for the present.

Through our work with our partner organisations, TOP – the Other Perspective, the Oriental Museum Durham, the Bowes Museum, Newcastle’s Discovery Museum, and the German Museum of Technology, and with other community organisations, museums, teachers, and academics from different disciplines, we hope that these findings will have a broad impact.

Bowing Cotton in India. Textile technologies are one of the project’s four focus areas. Watercolour ca 1800? Wellcome Library no. 576236i. Public Domain Mark

Textile technologies are one of the project’s four focus areas. This early seventeenth-century man’s cloak band, made out of linen cutwork and geometric lace, is held by our partner, The Bowes Museum, as part of the Blackborne Collection.

Ceramics are one of the project's four focus areas. This late 17th-century Japanese Arita blue and white porcelain jar is held by our partner museum, the Durham Oriental Museum: DUROM.2006.75. Bequeathed by Dr H. Muir.

Why?

Contemporary Anxieties about Migration and Technological Innovation

Migration and technological innovation are two of the greatest challenges and opportunities we face today. Both cause immense popular anxiety, threatening democratic rule and social cohesion.

In the UK, whose government is officially pursuing the policy of “a hostile environment” for refugees and undocumented migrants, fears about immigration have been a major deciding factor in the pro-Brexit vote and have led the popular media to characterise refugees fleeing war-torn countries as “cockroaches”. Similarly, the speed of modern technological innovation has also led to popular anxieties ranging from the anti-vaxxer movement to the destruction of 5G-phone masts.

At the same time, both migration and technological advances have been held up as the only answers to today’s world’s most pressing problems: climate change, a global pandemic, but also aging populations in the world’s most developed countries, which, without either immigration or a massive change in birth rates will not be able to keep up their levels of prosperity or indeed their pensions.

The Link Between Migration and Innovation

Migration and technological innovation are inextricably linked in another way, too: migration encourages innovation. This is old news to scholars working in migration studies and is now also recognised across science and technology studies. The Indian-Silicon Valley loop has been well studied, and most recently Dr. Ugur Sahin and Dr. Özlem Türeci, the German-Turkish couple who founded BioNTech, the company which developed the Pfizer vaccine, have made it onto the title page of Time Magazine (see below).

Case studies have shown both that skilled migration can strengthen or even birth new industries (think of the Huguenots bringing silk weaving to England and Prussia, or immigrant and first-generation Jews founding and running Hollywood) and that, to establish new technologies and manufactures, entrepreneurs and governments need to involve experts, often from abroad. This could be voluntary: in the eighteenth century, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore attracted French and Ottoman experts in weapons technology and instrument making, while French officials invited groups of Indian and Levantine cotton weavers to develop the French cotton industry. But it wasn’t always a matter of choice. Many artisans came as refugees and some were expressly kidnapped: Japan’s porcelain industry in and around Arita only took off after the capture of skilled Korean ceramics craftsmen during the invasions of Korea in the 1590s.

Such case studies, however, remain local and situation-specific. To come to broad conclusions about which factors influenced the success or failure both of the integration of expert migrants and of the diffusion of their skills and products, we need systematic, globally-comparative, and interdisciplinary studies, and that is exactly what this project will provide..

*Dr. Ugur Sahin & Dr.* Özlem Türeci on the cover of Time Magazine

Soft-paste porcelain Rococo clock on display in one of our partner museums, The Bowes Museum, in the Lady Ludlow Collection of English porcelain gifted to the Museum by The Art Fund in 2003.

Instrument making is one of the project’s four focus areas. This mechanical mouse is on display in The Bowes Museum.

How?

The State of the Scholarship So Far…

Recent scholarship has emphasised the central importance of cultural contacts and global knowledge transfers for innovation and technological improvement in general and for the Great Divergence in particular, that is the process by which, in around 1800, Europe overtook Asia, hitherto the world’s undisputed economic and manufacturing centre.

Anthropologists and revisionist historians of science have dismantled the old opposition between elite science and artisanal practice, between the 'hand' and ‘the mind’, and instead brought a new understanding of the materiality of knowledge, of ‘embodied skills’ and the ‘mindful hand’ of often highly mobile skilled workers. We now know that such knowledge could only successfully travel in an embodied form: that is, it could only be transmitted through the movement of experts themselves. The logical connection between the two findings must therefore be skilled migration.

Our Project…

Our team will investigate how skilled migration in the early modern period contributed to the transfer of new technologies, the development of new practices, objects, and fashions, and what factors hampered and impeded such innovations. By taking a globally comparative approach, the project will transcend the local and situation-specific to identify the mechanisms underpinning the success and failure both of the integration of the migrant and the adaptation and diffusion of his or her skills and outputs in the past. This will allow us to draw important parallels with, contrasts to, and guidelines for the present.

Such a study must take a multidisciplinary approach and we will be combining traditional economic history with migration studies, science and technology studies, and global material culture, working closely with several partner museums.

Research Design: Chronology and Geography

The period 1500-1800 was very deliberately chosen: it built up to and witnessed the Industrial Revolution and ‘Great Divergence’ during which the world economic and manufacturing centre moved from India and China, at the beginning of the period, to Europe by the end of it. Nevertheless, this was not yet an era of European predominance. A focus on this period therefore allows for a truly global approach and valuable comparisons, that are no longer possible in the later centuries of Western imperial and economic hegemony.

By 1500 China had developed many of the technologies that would characterise Europe’s later predominance: gunpowder, the compass, printing, and a proto-industrial manufacturing sector characterised by a high degree of division of labour, for instance in the famous porcelain kilns of Jingdezhen. Long before Britain, India produced cotton textiles on a broad spectrum of prices and qualities, customised to suit sophisticated consumer tastes in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and East Asia. Before Europe could rival Chinese porcelain or Indian Cotton production, it needed significant technological catch-up. Other commonalities stand out: both Europe and India as well as the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires were characterised by intense inter-state competition in which respective governments actively encouraged innovation in the sciences, technology, and manufacture, most notably through inviting (or capturing) skilled experts from abroad. Both Europe and Asia developed distinct cultures of scientific thinking and technical writing as ways of authorizing technology as a legitimate field of scholarly concern.

All of this, of course, requires a real team effort, and we have indeed created a brilliant team to work on our three regions. The PI, Felicia Gottmann, will work on Central and Western Europe and their colonies; Rémi Dewière on the Islamic world, that is the great gunpowder empires and smaller polities of the Middle East, Islamic Africa and South Asia; and Floris van Swet on the Sinosophere, the broader East Asian cultural sphere of East and Southeast Asia. Oliver Gunning, the project PhD student will be working on a smaller study of the British Isles and June Watson, our associate PhD student will focus on global female knowledge networks.

Focus Areas and Approach

The project will focus on four of the most innovative industries of the period: textiles, ceramics, armaments manufacturing, and watch or instrument making. Textiles were economically the most important part of the early modern manufacturing sector, and one that continued to expand and innovate throughout the period, becoming, in the guise of cotton manufacture, one of the mainstays of the Industrial Revolution. Like textiles, ceramics, armament manufacture, watch and instrument making expanded throughout the period, required highly skilled workers and saw high levels of technical innovation. These industries were of central importance for the scientific, military, and industrial revolutions, and their highly skilled practitioners were much sought-after by competing states. State and individual entrepreneurial efforts to attract such experts lead to increased levels of mobility, whilst conversely workers in these industries when faced with religious or political persecution at home found it easier to move abroad. The four areas saw genuinely global knowledge exchange in this period: as I already mentioned, French and Ottoman weapon-smiths and instrument makers moved to India, Korean porcelain makers to Japan, Chinese potters to the Safavid Empire, and Indian and Levantine weavers moved to France. Finally, all these sectors maintained close links with the ‘official’ scientific establishment. This makes them particularly suited to the explorations of connections between migration, skilled practice, scientific institutions, and technological innovation, as well as between these and the diffusion and implementation of such innovation.

The project will investigate the relative importance of different factors reflecting its interdisciplinary methodology. The factors to be investigated across the three regional studies and four focus areas will be: the technical and material; the institutional and economic; the sociocultural and the spatial; the role of actor networks. To do so we will work across academic disciplines and in collaboration with our museum partners to study both production processes and, crucially, the actual material objects produced.

Partners and Advisory Board

We could not undertake such an ambitious and interdisciplinary project without the advice and mentorship of our fantastic advisory board. We are immensely grateful for their support.

Just as crucial to our project is our collaboration with our partner institutions. In the heritage sector we are partnering with the Oriental Museum in Durham; the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle; and the German Museum of Technology in Berlin; as well as Tyne and Weir Archives and Museums with the Discovery Museum in Newcastle.

To better understand the crucial contributions that migrants make – and have always been making – to their host communities, we are partnering with TOP - The Other Perspective, a community interest organisation who work to foster the economic inclusion of migrants in the North East of England and beyond.

What?

What then will be the outcomes of this project and what do we hope to achieve?

We will produce several single and co-authored articles, an edited volume and a monograph, which you will find listed on this website as they are published. Just as, if not more important will be the public-facing work that we do.

In collaboration with our partner museums, we will hold internal knowledge exchange and training sessions and research in the museum collections. We will organise community and teacher training events, jointly work on exhibitions, and arrange a large international Project Conference at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin. This conference will extend our timeframe up to the present day and bring together museum curators, activists, and academics from STS, History and Philosophy of Science, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, Modern Languages, Literature, and History, who work on historical and contemporary migration and technology exchange. We will invite to collaborate on a volume which we will edit, but we also hope to create more publicly accessible multi-media content for our website to document the vital contribution that migrants are making – and have always made – to their host societies.

It is particularly important to us to link our work to the experiences of current migrants and refugees. So our collaboration will bring together our team and our partner museums with current migrants and refugees in the North East of England to learn from their experience and incorporate this into the exhibitions and project outputs. Together with TOP we will develop case studies that highlight current migrants’ economic and social contributions and publish these as policy papers and articles. These case studies will then feature next to the historical case studies we will develop. We will showcase them both on this website and in our partner museums’ exhibitions. Knowledge exchange activities with TOP will culminate in a workshop with teachers and migrants at the Discovery Museum to celebrate migrants’ historic contribution to British and global society beyond the well-known narratives covering only the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West.