World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

Professor Jenny Bulstrode of University College in London has just published an extraordinary article in the journal, History and Technology entitled “Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution”. The argument of the article is clear and is based on evidence not easily accessible to many researchers and from sources that required persistence and imagination to find:

“This paper identifies the Black metallurgists in Jamaica as the authors of one of the most significant innovations of the British industrial revolution, but this identification is only possible because the paper engages with the practices and purposes of those Black metallurgists on their own terms….Between 1783 and 1784, British financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron that has been celebrated as one of the most important innovations in the making of the modern world. Here, the concern is the 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed the process for which Cort took credit.”

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of wrought iron to the Industrial Revolution and how Britain used technological innovation to become the leading industrial state in the 18th and 19th centuries. But iron of great strength was difficult to manufacture. Bulstrode identifies 76 enslaved Jamaicans who developed a technique to produce efficiently iron with very few impurities in a foundry owned by John Reeder who did not know very much about producing iron. In Britain, Henry Cort was an iron producer who

“…learned of the Jamaican ironworks from a visiting cousin, a West Indies ship’s master who regularly transported “prizes” – vessels, cargo and equipment seized through military action – from Jamaica to England. Just months later, the British government placed Jamaica under military law and ordered the ironworks to be destroyed, claiming it could be used by rebels to convert scrap metal into weapons to overthrow colonial rule….

“The machinery was acquired by Cort and shipped to Portsmouth, where he patented the innovation. Five years later, Cort was discovered to have embezzled vast sums from navy wages and the patents were confiscated and made public, allowing widespread adoption in British ironworks.”

One of the most crucial elements of the British rise to power was its control over the metallurgical process. But the innovation was developed by enslaved people. The British stole the intellectual property of slaves and used the profits to enslave even more.