Improving Swedish Steelmaking: Circulation and Localized Knowledge-Making in Early Modernity.

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.