4 - Portable Lives: Reformed Artisans and Refined Materials in the Refugee Atlantic

Summary

This contribution focuses on early modern refugee artisans, and their families, who engaged actively with print culture while cobbling together spiritual ideas, natural philosophies, local scientific knowledge, and dexterous craft skills during the earliest years of the industrial revolution. It provides a “deep” history of the little-known entrepreneur Jacques Fontaine (1658–1728), a Huguenot refugee. Together with his wife and sister-in-law, Fontaine invented a small fire machine to produce a cheap imitation-silk finish on a common woolen textile. Fontaine’s experiences working with this commodity embody the crucial strategy of the so-called New Luxuries. This beacme a mainstay of the vast majority of highly skilled refugee Huguenot artisans scattered throughout the Atlantic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), who elevated local materials of little intrinsic worth to successfully imitate more desirable, expensive, and polite imported goods of greater intrinsic value, while jumpstarting the early industrial and consumer revolutions.