Abstract Recent scholarship has emphasised the central importance of cultural contact and global knowledge circulation for technological innovation; however, this connection remains understudied in the global early modern world. This introduction highlights the importance of combining migration history and the history of technology to shed new light on the roles of migrants in technological innovation from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. The seven articles presented in this issue offer a range of studies spanning four continents, encompassing a wide range of migrants. Gathered together, they outline the multitude of factors that allowed migrants to become integral parts of technological dialogue. Hence, this introduction presents the methodological and conceptual foundations to unearth the common processes that linked the migration-innovation nexus across the early modern world.
Swet et al. (Thu,) studied this question.