Editorial

We write today to express our unreserved support for an article published in History and Technology in July 2023, ‘Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution’ by Jenny Bulstrode (v. 39, n. 1). This article represents a considerable scholarly contribution to the field of History of Technology. It was published following the customary, rigorous processes of manuscript double-anonymous peer review. A post-publication review overseen by the journal’s publishers, Taylor & Francis, in response to reader concerns, confirms that the article upholds all scholarly standards. The publication of this article has been met by criticisms shared in email correspondence with the journal and also expressed in blogs and in a widely circulated paper-length response. Multiple editorials quoting those sources have also appeared in English-language mass-media outlets.¹ We find these criticisms to be based both on factual misreadings of the article text itself and on understandings of historical interpretation that elide the historical nature of archives and evidentiary practices themselves. We demonstrate here the accuracy of Bulstrode’s historical account. We see significant claims in the criticisms as well regarding the optimized conduct of historical study in 2023, with potentially disturbing consequences for our discipline. We address all of these here.

We offer our response below in two parts: first, a detailed set of responses to specific reader contestations of facts and findings offered in Bulstrode’s article; and second, a discussion of how this contestation of ‘Black Metallurgists’ represents in our view recent, worrisome developments in and adjacent to the study of transnational colonial-era history. The implications of these critical reactions for the ongoing historical study of technological change, of racial ideologies, and of industrial capitalism, and for the societal impacts of historical scholarship generally are many and we are eager to share with our readers our deep concerns surrounding this controversy. We note that a single factual error in Bulstrode’s article has been addressed through the publication of a Correction notice, but as the co-editors of this journal we find that the factual error in no way undermines the argument of the piece, as we explain below.² We find the article, ‘Black Metallurgists’ to constitute thoroughly researched, accurately recorded, and deeply impactful content.

Part I: facts and findings

Henry Cort was a British business owner granted a patent in 1783 for feeding heated bundles of scrap iron through grooved rollers to produce bar iron.³ The novelty was not in the rollers (there were previous patents for grooved rollers) nor in bundling scrap (the process of bundling scrap, heating it, and then hammering to make wrought iron had been practiced in Europe and elsewhere for a long time). The novelty was in rolling bundles of scrap. Up until now, historians had not produced evidence regarding how this specific technological practice came into being, accepting uncritically that a patent grants historical ownership of a technology to its holder.⁴ Bulstrode has amassed significant evidence to demonstrate that the practice came to the UK from Jamaica. More importantly, she has read the colonial archive, of which the patent is part, against the grain, to unveil the rich technological world of Black metallurgists in Jamaica. This reading reflects an established approach to researching the histories of settings in which dominant actors created all formal and administrative archives, largely occluding the experiences of subjugated communities, as we discuss further in Part II, below.⁵ Bulstrode’s article is not about the unsung Black heroes of the Industrial Revolution but an exploration of Black metallurgists’ technological practices in their own terms. Such terms include African cosmologies associated with iron making reworked in Jamaica through experiences of enslavement in sugar plantations and marronage. Detractors of Bulstrode’s article repeatedly ignore this central point of Bulstrode’s text, leading in large measure we believe to their inadequately substantiated claims of a lack of evidence and their contestation of Bulstrode’s reading of sources.

Based on the primary and secondary sources offered by Bulstrode (some reproduced by detractors of Bulstrode’s paper), it is fair to assume that John Reeder’s foundry first established in Jamaica in 1772 possessed many of the same technological elements present in Henry Cort’s works in Portsmouth, England; namely: reverberatory furnaces, scrap iron deployed as a raw material, and grooved rollers for transforming these raw materials into usable bar iron (more detail on these technologies below). Crucially, and as emphasized by Bulstrode, Reeder’s foundry depended for its functioning on Black people from African lineages of metallurgists with traditions of working scrap metal. Taking into full account the history of Black people enslaved to work in British-owned sugar plantations in Jamaica, Bulstrode rightly points to Black metallurgists’ familiarity both with the procedure of feeding sugar cane through iron grooved rollers and with working scrap metal to produce wrought iron.

To reiterate, the reader thus learns from Bulstrode’s article that Black metallurgists of Reeder’s foundry had worked scrap metal for many generations, used rollers to produce iron goods, produced iron grooved rollers for use on sugar plantations, made the same iron products that Henry Cort produced in Portsmouth, and were only too well acquainted with feeding sugar cane through iron rollers. Moreover, there were significant connections between Portsmouth, where Cort operated, and Jamaica established through the Royal Navy (more on these connections, below). Considering Cort’s 1783 patent focused on the very particular practice of feeding bundles of scrap metal through rollers, for which there was no previous European tradition, the historian is entitled to argue that Cort learned this practice from Jamaican Black metallurgists.

Those who dispute Bulstrode’s claims in the press and in letters to History and Technology have focused on two main issues: 1) the translation between sugar and iron technologies materialized in grooved rollers and practices of feeding bundles through them; and 2) the means through which Henry Cort learned about Jamaican processes. We contend that a detailed discussion of these two points only reinforces Bulstrode’s case for considering a Jamaican origin for Cort’s patent.

Technology translation between sugar and iron

Let us start with the relation between sugar and iron. There is no direct reference in any source quoted by Bulstrode or in the archaeological record to grooved rollers used to work iron at John Reeder’s foundry. But in the early 1780s, not only were grooved rollers for the working of iron not new (remember, Cort did not get his patent for this), but Black metallurgists were also producing iron grooved rollers to crush sugar cane in surrounding plantations. Traditionally, grooved rollers for the processing of sugar had been mounted vertically and had grooves running along their length. Since the first patent for horizontally positioned grooved rollers for processing sugar cane was granted to George Smeaton in 1754, these were increasingly common in Jamaica and in the Americas more broadly.⁶ It is safe to assume Black metallurgists working at Reeder’s Pen, the main foundry in Jamaica, in the early 1780s produced both types of iron rollers, horizontal and vertical. As was common at the time, and as the sources quoted by Bulstrode suggest, they also had horizontal mills to work iron. The historian of technology has thus evidence of the existence at Reeder’s foundry in Jamaica of rolls for the preparation of both sugar and metal, with the same shapes, materials, and layout; and, more importantly, of a very common practice of passing bundled things through them. It is thus sound to conclude, as Bulstrode does, that people who were so familiar with both sugar and iron production overlapped in their approaches to the two operations and passed bundles of scrap metal through grooved rollers.

There is in fact a long pedigree of historians of technology who have explored the connections between sugar processing and metal working. Joseph Needham, in the fourth volume of his monumental Science and Civilisation in China (1965), had already positioned the cotton gin and sugarcane mill as the ‘ancestors of all steel-rolling mills, mangles and paper or textile machinery’ (pt.2, 92).⁷ But while such historiography tended to focus exclusively on shapes and mechanisms, Maroon sources carefully read by Bulstrode, and underappreciated or elided entirely by the article’s detractors, point also to the significant connections established between sugar and iron through intricate rituals enacted by Black people in Jamaica. The current criticisms ignore the sugar/iron connections established through oaths and naming practices described by Bulstrode. Such connections were certainly not present in Portsmouth where sugar and iron were commodities heretofore considered to occupy two worlds apart, thus contributing to the original narrative of Cort as an inventor, his innovation of feeding bundles through rollers apparently originating solely from his industrious mind. Bulstrode, by critically reading colonial sources and making Maroon sources into important material for historians of technology, offers a more persuasive account of what happened. She importantly asserts that the specific technological practice described by Cort’s patent is the result of transitions between sugar and iron technologies performed through concrete labor and ritual practices of Black people in Jamaica.

Transporting innovation

Now to the question of how Henry Cort knew about Jamaican technological practices. Cort’s iron works were located in Portsmouth, close to the shipyards of the British Royal Navy, which was responsible for protecting the convoys returning to Great Britain from the Caribbean colony. This demanded an ability to maintain and repair ships on both sides of the Atlantic. Henry Cort’s contract with the Admiralty, that first led to his interest in recycling scrap metal in large quantities and ultimately to his patent, was granted for producing mast hoops from scrap for the Royal Navy. Reeder’s foundry in Jamaica recycled scrap metal not only to supply sugar plantations, but also to repair and equip ships (with things like cannons and the same mast hoops that Cort was trying to make in a profitable manner in Portsmouth). While the historical record does not provide again any immediate proof that Cort knew about what was going on at Reeder’s foundry, Bulstrode gives enough information for readers to appreciate how the relation between the two sites was mediated through the Royal Navy and extensive financial interests, thus sustaining the inference of the existence of knowledge traveling between the two geographies.

Bulstrode quotes a source describing how the ship, Abby, commanded by John Cort and sailing from Jamaica to Lancaster but landing in Portsmouth instead because of a storm, brought the news of Reeder’s foundry to Henry Cort. The source used here was properly identified enabling any reader to check the validity of the author’s interpretation, as they can also do with all the other 222 footnotes of her article. Editors and author were informed of the author’s misreading of the source, and following standard academic procedure there is now a published Correction notice in the journal in which the ship, Princess Royal of the Royal Navy, from the same convoy travelling between Jamaica and England, is properly identified as the ship that landed in Portsmouth.⁸ This said, the argument remains in place. The important fact to retain is the connection established between Portsmouth and Jamaica through ships that needed to be repaired on both sides of the Atlantic with iron pieces.

Bulstrode’s description of the dismantling of Reeder’s foundry in 1782, in which its remains and ‘stock’ were loaded into ships coinciding with Cort’s ‘discovery’ of a new process to work scrap, reinforces the importance of considering the historical connections between Jamaica and Portsmouth. The article’s detractors, focused again on detecting misuse and misinterpretation of sources by Bulstrode, insist that according to sources, ‘stock’ only refers to ‘articles for ships of war, and utensils for sugar plantations’, and that there is thus no basis to think that any machinery was shipped back to England. Again, utensils for sugar plantations included grooved roller mills, a point strangely not considered by the detractors, denoting again their refusal to consider translation between sugar and iron technology. They also ignore that the core of the patent case put forth by Henry Cort was not new machinery, but the specific practice of feeding bundled scrap iron through grooved rollers. Moreover, there is an insistent reference among the different detractors to a conspiracy by Henry Cort which is simply nowhere mentioned in the published article by Bulstrode.

Based on narrow approaches to colonial-era sources, Bulstrode’s detractors repeatedly misread and misconstrue her arguments. One final example of criticism we note here takes up Bulstrode’s interpretation of the destruction of Reeder’s foundry emphasizing the ‘threat of Black retribution’ to British rule in Jamaica: ‘This is simply untrue’, the critic holds, as ‘The source Bulstrode cites as evidence here, Campbell’s detailed report to the King, is solely concerned with his plans for the defense of Jamaica against the superior Franco-Spanish force’.⁹ We note in response that the option of the British retreating to the island’s mountains was based on previous experience of Maroon wars that had put into question British control of the island. Moreover, inter-imperial war in the Caribbean recurrently involved consideration of slave rebellions. Bulstrode’s reading of the source is framed by a knowledge of the history of warfare in the Caribbean. It is an accurate reading and avoids taking colonial sources without a critical, historically informed view.

Part II: historical scholarship in the contemporary context

We turn now to the implications of Bulstrode’s article and the primary elements of readers’ criticisms for the larger study of history today as the field seeks to serve both academic and popular audiences. We begin by stressing that Bulstrode has brought to the study of industrial technology and enslavement a strongly critical, deeply reflective, and rigorous analytical approach. She has taken up emerging historiographic approaches from the History of Technology, African- and Diasporic Black History, and the History of British trade and imperialism to produce a powerfully refreshed account of Black metallurgy in Jamaica at the end of the eighteenth century. Her research is original – namely, her study of the transitions between sugar and iron technologies and the focus on long traditions of working scrap metal – and models sophisticated critical engagement with existing historical narratives and archival techniques.

Historiographic significance and historical meaning

We see Bulstrode’s article as based in a large literature supporting her decentering of white actors in formative technological developments of the early British industrial era. For example, in the past 35 years or so, a broad reshaping of colonial-era European history has created a new outlook on the historical movements of goods, peoples and knowledges perpetrated through trans-national projects of conquest and wealth accumulation. These studies have problematized the concepts of modernization and industrialization to help show the close ties between these aims and colonizers’ assertions of geopolitical, racial, and religious supremacy – assertions which have served to render historically invisible many activities of subjugated peoples. Over roughly the past 15 years, historians have carried this problematization into many particulars of technological and infrastructural change in colonial and post-colonial eras. Historical accounts of indigenous and other knowledge systems marginalized in colonial settings have made clear just how narrowly EuroAmerican historiographic legacies have defined both meaningful human understandings of nature and materialities (so-named science and technology) and historical impacts of these understandings.¹⁰

Within the field of History of Technology itself, we have now seen at least four decades of concerted work on Black, Brown and indigenous technological efficacy under regimes of settlement, enslavement and indenture.¹¹ With a broadened rubric that includes agricultural, healing, design and other knowledge applications, historians have newly identified ‘technological contributions’ from enslaved and indentured people globally. In collaboration with scholars from the fields of Africana-, Caribbean-, Latinx- and South Asian Studies, historians of science and technology have developed a complex literature regarding the material and environmental conditions, language, and cultural practices of subjugated communities to bring a widened lens on technological activity.

In her study of Jamaican forge operations, Bulstrode embraces these historiographic approaches to reject the conventional schema of technoscientific know-how moving outward from EuroAmerican cultures to be taken up in ‘less developed’ settings, a schema which valorizes EuroAmerican intellects and disallows for non-European peoples as the creators of novel technological practices. Moreover, she emphasizes that the technological or design practices that were of value to the so-named Industrial Revolution in Britain and later North America did not derive from a singular cultural source (white, European ingenuity). Relatedly, we learn from her article that the envisioned end-point of efficiency in manufacturing cannot be seen to have brought forth all of the material knowledge that ultimately proved to be of importance to industrial scale up in Britain and beyond. The diversity of cultural and knowledge frameworks (including sugar production and spiritual observance) from which African metallurgists derived their scrap-metal processing techniques suggests that historians can look much more widely than they have previously done for the conceptual bases of industrial technologies; ‘Black Metallurgists’ thus builds on a well-established and much lauded historiographic legacy and adeptly extends it.

Another broad platform of scholarly developments supports this article as a rigorous interrogation of past technological events and previous narratives of those events. As many scholars have now shown, the primacy of white, EuroAmerican attainments in historical accounts of industrialization – corroborating the intellectual superiority of those dominant actors – reflects the demographics of the history academy itself. The academic playing field is by no means entirely open or equitable and as in other humanities fields, constructions of meritorious scholarship in the History of Technology and Science are still constrained by narrowed EuroAmerican legacies of humanistic intervention.¹² Nonetheless, as women, people of color, and non-EuroAmerican historians have increased their representation in the discipline and sub-fields such as Africana or Diasporic Studies have grown, many previously understudied episodes of material and scientific innovation and application have gained visibility. At the same time, profound changes to the historiography of enslavement in the Americas have produced resonant transformations, displacing narratives that center the agencies and experiences of white capitalists.¹³ No determinative relationship between the self-identifications of the historian and their work is implied here; but crucially what is seen to constitute meaningful, and hence legitimate, evidence in any historical accounting is now widely understood to demand reflection on the part of the historian regarding their own analytic normativities and disciplinary commitments.¹⁴ This does not imply a renunciation of methodological precision or disciplinary consensus; to the contrary. A more critical, and thereby more meticulous, engagement with primary and secondary sources results from the historian’s consideration of their own epistemic starting point and historical location.

As one example, that widened lens has required historians to step back from familiar ideas of what counts as ‘invention’ or who merits credit as ‘an inventor’ to provincialize long-held standards in Western scholarship of what comprises historically significant technological activity. Bulstrode’s article builds on this openness regarding the processes by which subject matter is defined, attainments attributed, and evidence selected. For example, she brings to this literature an agile analytic by which ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ must be detached from pre-existing ideas of where a particular technology begins and ends. The alleged variable orientation of grooved rollers for processing scrap metal (vertical and horizontal) has been cited by critics of ‘Black Metallurgists’ as disqualifying Black forge workers in Jamaica from the status of inventors of the roller process ultimately deployed by manufacturers in Britain. These claims by critics represent arbitrary demarcations among forms and functions. Functionality, like cost, is not irrelevant, but neither factor inarguably defines ingenuity.¹⁵ As philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists of technology have made clear, what constitutes the relative value – including the specific value of novelty – of any human project is itself culturally determined. We extend this to a historical analytic that sees a similar cultural determinant in the granting of inventive credit.¹⁶ In the present case: It is only if we take it for granted that the British application of a technological concept constitutes its ‘invention’ that its origins in Black metallurgists’ practices can be denied.

Beyond recuperation

We also want to stress that Bulstrode’s identification of Black material acuity and design contributions in Jamaican forge work is not primarily a valorizing project; that is, its intention is not to establish parity between white, EuroAmerican technological prowess and the activities of enslaved African peoples. Suggesting such parity would effectively silence the historical conditions of conquest and enslavement. While the recognition of talent and ingenuity on the parts of enslaved people is entirely central to any honest historical accounting of the period, along with unceasing attention to enslavers’ brutality and the violence of unfree labor systems generally, we also learn through Bulstrode’s work of the ongoing role of anti-Black formulations that can conform history-writing. That is, we are supported in reflecting on the selection of evidence and explanatory frameworks, and on the arbitration of ‘accuracy’ in history-writing as themselves productive of particular race relations. This is an immensely important aspect of both Bulstrode’s and our journal’s role in contemporary academic and popular exchange.

There is, we might say, no social separation of the historian and their subject; a mutually shaping relationship is inescapable. In perhaps the simplest sense, when critics point out that the patent held by Cort contravenes Bulstrode’s claim that Black forge workers developed the rolling process, they omit the history of patents as part of a whites-only legal apparatus. In this way they carry the value of the late eighteenth-century patent and the commendable status that accrues to its holder into 2023 while (as described in Part I) treating written records of the white merchants’ inventive acumen as transparent records of activity. In making these claims, the critics imply that the archive is something that is self-evident, when clearly archives necessarily represent the interests and priorities of the archives’ creators. But a deeper challenge to what we see as meaningful historical accountability is also taking shape here as the critics return repeatedly to claims that politics must not direct historical research and interpretation. To make the case, as several of our correspondents have done, that ‘facts are facts’ (and that at bottom, Bulstrode is not adhering to what they see as the facts), is to deny a foundational tenet of humanities scholarship of the last several generations: That our perceptions of objectivity themselves derive from situated experiences. All historians necessarily select the conditions, actors and materialities that they find to be significant and thus, to constitute the events of the past.

We by no means hold that ‘fiction’ is a meaningless category – dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism.¹⁷ To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

Notes

1. Jelf, “Origins of Henry Cort’s Rolling Process.” This preprint was shared with the journal by Oliver Jelf, identified on the preprint as a master’s student. The paper and author provide no indication of the author’s past or present academic or institutional affiliations and History+Technology has been unable to ascertain this information. Newspaper and blog posts include William Lee, “Oxford Refutes a Scholar’s Claim that the Hero of the Industrial Revolution Stole his idea from Jamaican slaves,” Canada Daily News, September 16, 2023; available at https://canadadaily.news/oxford-refutes-a-scholars-claim-that-the-hero-of-the-industrial-revolution-stole-his-idea-from-jamaican-slaves/ Accessed October 19, 2023; Anton Howes, “Age of Invention: Cort Case,” July 7, 2023, available at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-cort-case?publication_id=18480&isFreemail=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email Accessed October 19, 2023 and “Does History have a Replication Crisis?” August 29, 2023; available at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-does-history-have?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=18480&post_id=136372108&isFreemail=true Accessed October 19, 2023.

2. See “Correction”, https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2023.2278894.

3. Mott, Henry Cort.

4. On ownership and the history of technology see the recent, Schäfer et al., Ownership of Knowledge.

5. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

6. Horizontal sugarcane roller mills would become even more common in the nineteenth century with the use of the steam engine. The bibliography suggests constant experimenting with different combinations of number and orientation of rollers by the late eighteenth century across the Americas. Daniels and Daniels, “The Origin of the Sugarcane Roller Mill”; Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society; and Deerr, The History of Sugar.

7. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 92

8. See note 2 above.

9. Jelf, “Origins of Henry Cort’s Rolling Process,” 10.

10. Gomez, Experiential Caribbean; Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats; and d’Avignon, Ritual Geology.

11. Examples are too numerous to mention but to indicate something of the range of geographical settings, historical episodes and technological forms addressed by historians from this perspective, see Carney, Black Rice; Dew, Bond of Iron; Malone, Skulking Way of War; Bhattacharyya, Empire and Ecology; Mavhunga, Mobile Workshop; and Subramanian, Shoreline.

12. Thurner and Cañizares-Esguerra, The Invention of Humboldt; Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Ferguson, Reorder of Things; and Saraiva, Black Science.

13. Mathisen, “The Second Slavery.”

14. Trouillot, Silencing the Past; McRuer, Crip Theory, 33–76; and Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 17–42.

15. Kara Swanson has ably shown the role of such demarcations in the history of US patenting, a system she explicates as one of white legal and economic empowerment; Swanson, “Race and Selective Legal Memory.”

16. Pickering, “New Ontologies”; Coppin, “Crate and Mangle”; Slaton, “Introduction” and New Materials.

17. Mukharji, “Occulted Materialities”; Martin, “Researching Race”; and Saraiva, “Black Science.”