Places for Making, Places for Taking. Metals in the Global World, 1630-1820.

Time period:

1 January 2013 – 31 December 2015

Project leader:

Göran Rydén

Project member:

Chris Evans

Funder:

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond

Type of award:

Project grant

Total funding:

3,600,000 SEK

This application is about the transition from early modernity to modernity. Was the onset of modernity preordained or was its emergence a matter of contingency? We are concerned with the dynamics of early modern change and how change operated across space as well as through time. We pursue this master question through a study of metals – iron and steel, copper and brass. The making, trading and consuming of these strategic metals enables us to specify what was distinctive about the early modern and to explore its relationship with what came after.

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.