Book123

    Free register and download UseNet downloader, then you can FREE Download from UseNet.

    Download without Limit " History/Military Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century " from UseNet for FREE!

More

Baltic Iron in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century

(The Atlantic World: Europe, Africa and the Americas, 1500 - 1830) by Chris Evans, Goran Ryden

This book looks at the one of the key commercial links between the Baltic and Atlantic worlds in the eighteenth century - the export of Swedish and Russian iron to Britain - and its role in the making of the modern world.



Buy Book at Lowest Price on Amazon





-<To fans of interesting, necessary and useful books CLICK HERE>-

PREFACE

This is a book about iron making and the international trade in iron

during the eighteenth century. Iron, it is argued, was the very stuff of

modernity. The nails and bolts into which it was hammered fastened the

new urban fabric of Georgian Britain in place and held tolerably rigid

the creaking sailing ships that carried ever greater volumes of commodities

across the oceans. Indeed, iron became omnipresent in the

eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Iron—and its alloy steel—was there

in the precision instruments of Enlightenment science, just as it was in

the shackles that restrained enslaved Africans as they made their way to

the plantations of the New World.

The greater availability of iron in the eighteenth century is usually

seen as a consequence of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It was not.

Iron became ubiquitous in Britain, and those parts of the Atlantic world

with which Britain traded, because of imports from the Baltic. That

link between the Baltic and the Atlantic is our theme and the basis for a

wider argument about Atlantic history.

This project began in the mid-1990s through a chance meeting of the

two authors. A preliminary conversation outside a pub near the National

Archives in London revealed that we shared some assumptions about

historical causality and historical practice. (We also discovered a shared

conviction that Fullers London Pride is the world’s most thirst-quenching

beer.) We were soon convinced that the story of Britain’s iron industry

and that of Sweden should properly be told as a single, intertwined

story. Such was our theoretical conclusion; the difficulty lay in finding

materials with which to demonstrate the point. Eventually, we found

our answer in Somerset Archives. An exploratory trip in 1998 had us

examining the business papers of Graffin Prankard, an early eighteenthcentury

Bristol merchant. Prankard’s letters were dotted with mysterious

hieroglyphic squiggles—mysterious, that is, to those unacquainted with

Swedish industrial history. To Göran Rydén, the symbols that Prankard

scratched into his letter books were instantly recognisable; they were the

brand marks stamped onto bars of Swedish iron.

Prankard, it transpired, was a major importer of Swedish iron. Better

still, he was an avid buyer of iron from the estates of Charles De

Geer, Sweden’s leading ironmaster. And the De Geer ironworks were,

like Prankard’s business, very well documented. We had our empirical

link—one that bridged the North Sea and that shed light on both Atlantic

commerce and life in Swedish iron making communities. Finding

an appropriate way of presenting our findings, however, posed a new

challenge. We took inspiration from another shared passion: baroque

music.

The fugue, it seemed to us, was an appropriate metaphor through

which to arrange our material. The way in which the different musical

parts were held in dialectical tension was a model to which we aspired

when organising our analysis. Yet there were, of course, many different

styles of the baroque. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, which

we have come to think of as the soundtrack to our labours, can be heard

in many different ways. Jordi Savall’s rendition, for example, in which

wind instruments augment the strings, stands in contrast to more traditional

performances. History comes in forms that are equally various.

There are national styles and these are not always congruent. Historical

writing in Britain is often literary in form; narrative is preferred to

analytical exposition. In Sweden the reverse is true. Full and systematic

analysis in the German style is the model to be followed. Our aim in

this book is not to reconcile the two, but to exploit the strengths of each

tradition.

Ours has been a closely coordinated collaborative venture. The

research questions emerged from lengthy joint discussion; much of

the archival research was undertaken in the company of one another;

and the completed text is the result of drafts and counter-drafts that

have been swapped back and forth numberless times. Although the last

touches to the text have been made by Chris Evans as the native English

speaker in our partnership, this is in every way a joint project.

Needless to say, we have incurred many debts. Heading the list of

creditors are two accomplished historians: Åsa Eklund and Owen Jackson.

Åsa’s licentiate thesis at the University of Uppsala, undertaken under

the supervision of Göran Rydén, showed us what could be done in

tracing patterns of commerce between Stockholm and Bristol. Owen,

who was employed at the University of Glamorgan in 2000–2001 as a

research assistant funded by the Economic and Social Research Council,

took up the challenge. He laboured long and hard on Graffin Prankard’s

account books, converting the often confusing contents into a body of

data that was usable for historical analysis. We thank them both.

Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123