Caribbean Seminar Series: The Cogs and the Wheels

THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT

This presentation concerns the skill of enslaved Black engineers in exacting forms of metalwork such as watchmaking and toolmaking. Economic history has recently shown that equivalent communities in late 17th and 18th century Britain were a key factor in driving Britain’s technological ‘success’.

The talk argues that, by these histories’ own standards, the skills of Black artisans in British colonised territory in the same period were even more crucial. However, to understand the skills of these enslaved engineers of African descent requires engaging with who they were and what mattered to them; and that engagement challenges the very definition of success within which industrial revolution technology and innovation have been interpreted and understood.

The 18th century watch and the skills required to make it have become icons of British industrial innovation, but while British industrial innovation owes a great debt to the skills and knowledge of enslaved Black artisans, its iconography cannot explain what their skills and knowledge meant to them. This presentation argues that economic history would do well to look to Anansi.

This presentation is part of a new project Jenny is developing into Caribbean watch- and tool-makers pre-1800; and builds on her 2023 research paper ‘Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution’.