The migration–innovation nexus in the early modern world

Abstract

Scholars have long been aware of the link between migration and technological innovation in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, but our understanding of this connection in the early modern period is poor and hampered by presentist preconceptions. This article sets out to launch a new research agenda that puts the agency of migrants back at the centre of the analysis, establishing how this connection worked in practice in the period before Western hegemony. It does so in three steps: analytically, to show how recent advances in the history and philosophy of science demonstrate the logical link between migration, mobility, and innovation; via a typological survey, to show how widespread this connection was across the early modern world; and finally, via a series of microhistorical case studies from different cultural contexts that write migrant agency back into the story. These case studies identify the factors that contributed to the success and failure of the experience of the migrant, and the adaptation and diffusion of their skills and outputs.