The project "Migration, Adaptation, Innovation: 1500–1800,” funded by UK Research and Innovation, offers the first globally comparative study of skilled migration covering the origins of industrialisation and modern economic growth. Combining interdisciplinary methods (economic history, science and technology studies, material culture, and migration studies) with a globally comparative approach, this project will transcend the local and situation specific to identify the mechanisms underpinning the success and failure both of the integration of the migrant and the adaptation and diffusion of his or her skills and outputs in the past, allowing us to draw important parallels with, contrasts to, and guidelines for the present. Concretely, the project investigates the conditions for, and obstacles to, the successful application and diffusion of the knowledge, skills, and techniques or technologies brought by immigrant experts in the early modern world, specifically including non-elite, non-European, and female migrants. In order to evaluate the relative importance of technical, material, institutional, economic, socio-cultural, and personal or locational factors, it concentrates on the most inventive manufacturing industries of the time which had close ties both to formal scientific enquiry and to state-support schemes in an age when nascent industrialisation coincided with interstate rivalries: textiles, ceramics including glass, and weapons technology. Comparative across time and space it will contrast case-studies from Europe and its colonies, the East and South East Asia and the Islamic World in the period before Western hegemony: 1500 to 1800.  

This symposium brings together members of the project and MPIWG to discuss skilled migration and scientific and technological innovation in premodern, early-modern and modern periods.