Jamaican slaves brought a key advance to the Industrial Revolution

July 10 () –

A key innovation of the industrial revolution, attributed to Englishman Henry Cort, was actually invented in Jamaica by black metalworkers, most of whom were enslaved.

The innovation, widely known as the “Cort process” after the English financier-turned-ironmaster who took credit for it, it made it possible to convert scrap and poor-quality iron into wrought iron on an industrial scale.

The profits from innovation helped transform Britain into a global economic powerhouse, enabling British industries to manufacture and export everything from iron railways, iron ships and iron engines to iron suspension bridges and iron factories. iron. The method and its derivatives were even used to build “iron palaces”: Famous structures like Crystal Palace, Kew Gardens and the arches at St Pancras International Station in London.

The innovation was patented by Cort between 1783 and 1784, but in a new article in the journal History and Technology, UCL (University College London) dtcora Jenny Bulstrode shows how it was used at a major Jamaican iron works run by metallurgists. blacks several years before Cort’s patent. Many of these metalworkers were enslaved people trafficked from West Africa and West Central Africa, home to some of the greatest ironworker civilizations in world history.

The owner of the Jamaican iron works, a white slaver named John Reeder, described himself as “rather ignorant of that business,” but how the black metalworkers at his foundry were “perfect in all branches of the iron factory.” iron” and through his skill, he could turn scrap metal and poor quality metal into valuable wrought iron.

bulstrode said it’s a statement: “The myth of Henry Cort needs to be revised. The so-called Cort process, one of the most important innovations in the creation of the modern world, was developed by highly skilled black metallurgists, most of whom were enslaved, for their own purposes. . Acknowledgment of the debt that the British industrial revolution owes to black innovation is long overdue.”

The innovation combined two techniques: baling scrap metal and heating it in a furnace that kept the metal separate from the heat source; and the use of grooved rollers, normally only found in sugar mills, instead of the smooth rolls conventionally used in European iron production. Bound, heated, and squeezed through rollers in this way, the iron underwent a kind of mechanical alchemy that transformed it from worthless scrap to valuable metal. In 1781, the Jamaican iron foundry was making a profit of £4,000 a year (equivalent to a relative annual income of £7.4 million in 2020).

While the Jamaican steel industry was making spectacular annual profits, Henry Cort was facing bankruptcy. A financier from the age of 16, Cort took over the Portsmouth iron foundry from one of his clients in 1775 and shelled out substantial sums to secure a contract to supply the Royal Navy’s iron foundry. He had hoped for an easy profit, but soon discovered that he had contracted to trade the old Navy junk for new, no way to work old rusty metal without having a loss.

Using shipping records and old newspapers, Bulstrode’s investigation traces how Henry Cort learned of the Jamaican Iron Works from a visiting cousin, a West Indies sea captain who regularly transported “prizes” (seized vessels, cargo and equipment through military action) from Jamaica to England.

In 1782, just a few months after Cort learned of the lucrative Jamaica smelter, the British government placed Jamaica under military law and ordered the iron works to be destroyed. The reason given in public was to prevent it from falling into the hands of a rival power such as France, Spain or the Netherlands. In private, the military governor expressed his, they could overthrow the doconcern that if black Jamaicans could turn scrap metal into cannonsBritish colonial minion.

The foundry was razed to the ground and the factory’s machinery and equipment packed onto ships and transported to Portsmouth, where Henry Cort patented the innovation.

Five years later, Cort was found to have embezzled *39,676 of Navy salaries. In response, the british government confiscated the patents and made them publicwhich allowed the widespread acceptance of the innovation among British steel companies.