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Industrialisation has almost always been analysed retrospectively as the 'prehistory' of our modern era. This has been the case ever since Arnold Toynbee introduced the concept of the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century, and this story has been repeated by scholars such as David Landes and Joel Mokyr. In this article, we flip the perspective to approach industrialisation as a gradual process incorporating technology, the organisation of labour, markets, and state politics. Our case deals with ironmaking, the most important non-agricultural sector in the early modern Swedish economy, and emphasises changing notions of work and the daily routines of skilled artisans and mobile civil servants in Swedish workshops and abroad. Tracing the development of Swedish metal manufacturing, the continued dominance of a traditional idea of householding is apparent, and with it a key link between labour and natural resources. In the second half of the eighteenth century, state officials such as Samuel Schroder and Sven Rinman took a more prominent role in promoting several interrelated improvements, from the "English way" of organising work to finding new ways of refining iron and steel and adapting to changing markets. The valuable storehouse of ore and metals increasingly came under the authority of the state. It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century, however, that groundbreaking paths ahead were articulated by members of the Swedish mining administration, often building on advances seen in Britain. Eric Thomas Svedenstierna and Gustaf Broling saw the potential of steam engines, mineral coal, and large-scale production, but it was left to the ironmaking entrepreneur Gustaf Ekman, a couple of decades later, to initiate the full industrialisation of the iron trade by implementing what was known in Sweden as the Lancashire method. By analysing the trajectories of individuals - in our case mobile officials - we achieve a better forward-looking understanding of the industrialisation process, an approach that also bridges the spheres of discourse and practice.

Industrialisation has almost always been analysed retrospectively as the ‘prehistory’ of our modern era. This has been the case ever since Arnold Toynbee introduced the concept of the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century, and this story has been repeated by scholars such as David Landes and Joel Mokyr. In this article, we flip the perspective to approach industrialisation as a gradual process incorporating technology, the organisation of labour, markets, and state politics. Our case deals with ironmaking, the most important non-agricultural sector in the early modern Swedish economy, and emphasises changing notions of work and the daily routines of skilled artisans and mobile civil servants in Swedish workshops and abroad.

Tracing the development of Swedish metal manufacturing, the continued dominance of a traditional idea of householding is apparent, and with it a key link between labour and natural resources. In the second half of the eighteenth century, state officials such as Samuel Schröder and Sven Rinman took a more prominent role in promoting several interrelated improvements, from the “English way” of organising work to finding new ways of refining iron and steel and adapting to changing markets. The valuable storehouse of ore and metals increasingly came under the authority of the state. It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century, however, that groundbreaking paths ahead were articulated by members of the Swedish mining administration, often building on advances seen in Britain. Eric Thomas Svedenstierna and Gustaf Broling saw the potential of steam engines, mineral coal, and large-scale production, but it was left to the ironmaking entrepreneur Gustaf Ekman, a couple of decades later, to initiate the full industrialisation of the iron trade by implementing what was known in Sweden as the Lancashire method. By analysing the trajectories of individuals – in our case mobile officials – we achieve a better forward-looking understanding of the industrialisation process, an approach that also bridges the spheres of discourse and practice.

This article explores the multicentered processes that transformed artisanal metalworking in early modern Europe. It does so through an in-depth analysis of the attempts to improve steelmaking in eighteenth-century Sweden. Scholarship has traditionally focused on progress in the British steel industry, but the quest for improvement in Sweden's expanding steel sector, integrating various forms of cross-border mobility, illustrates a more spatially and temporally diverse history of technological development. This case study underlines the need to consider a wider group of actors and practices in metallurgical advances and elucidates the interaction between statecraft, scientific inquiry, and artisanal work, thereby highlighting the work-related foundations for novel perceptions of economic and industrial progress.

Swedish ironmaking took place in mines, forests and rationally structured ironmaking communities (bruk), merging different forms of labour and coercion, wage labour, household labour and corvée labour often in the form of transport duties, as well as leases paid in kind. The aim is to analyse this diverse structure from an angle of motion, movement and mobility, and see how subordinated ironmaking artisanal and peasant households set the limits for the regions in which they were living while undertaking that work. It is essential to link this work to the owners' ambition to control production, the workers and the tasks they were set to do. It meant to supervise production at the workshops, but more importantly, it meant to monitor the movement of raw material, grain and commodities, between these sites and markets outside the region. I use an extensive accounting material from one region to unravel patterns of work, and the owners' ambitions to keep track of subordinated artisans and peasants. These patterns of work and supervision were, together with legal structures, a crucial element in the making of the spatial structuring of Swedish ironmaking.

Sweden was a major exporter of iron during the early-modern period, but there was also an important domestic steelmaking. We analyse the Swedish iron and steel trade in a long perspective in a European context. Our approach departs from recent discussions on industrial and scientific developments, in which the spheres of “Hand” and “Mind” are brought together, and where artisanal skills and natural resources are highlighted. We emphasise how the migration of people, and movements of materials and knowledge, influenced a process of gradual change. A key feature was the ongoing interactions between working people and educated savants. Our conclusion points to the perseverance of artisanal skills well into the nineteenth century, but also towards new links between work, technology, and markets.