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Improving Swedish Steelmaking: Circulation and Localized Knowledge-Making in Early Modernity
- Technology and Culture
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 64, Number 2, April 2023
- pp. 515-542
- 10.1353/tech.2023.0060
- Article
- Additional Information
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abstract:
This article explores the multicentered processes that transformed artisanal metalworking in early modern Europe. It does so through an in-depth analysis of the attempts to improve steelmaking in eighteenth-century Sweden. Scholarship has traditionally focused on progress in the British steel industry, but the quest for improvement in Sweden's expanding steel sector, integrating various forms of cross-border mobility, illustrates a more spatially and temporally diverse history of technological development. This case study underlines the need to consider a wider group of actors and practices in metallurgical advances and elucidates the interaction between statecraft, scientific inquiry, and artisanal work, thereby highlighting the work-related foundations for novel perceptions of economic and industrial progress.