The Diffusion of English Iron  Technology to Colonial America: Eugene Lee WyattÂ
Book Details
Author(s)Eugene Lee Wyatt
ISBN / ASINB00KY752XO
ISBN-13978B00KY752X8
MarketplaceFrance 🇫🇷
Description
The promise of a new world
At the beginning of the seventeenth century England’s cities were teeming cesspools of unemployed, impoverished victims of “enclosure†and industrialized machine manufacturing. Enclosure had allowed wealthy landowners to force peasant families off the land their families had farmed for generations, and machines caused masses of industrial workers to become obsolete.
At the same time North America had been discovered, and was being explored by English adventurers. The new land seemed to promise infinite land and infinite resources free for the taking for any Englishman who could get there.
About a century earlier Spanish Conquistadors had conquered much of Central and South America, and had discovered, and transported back to Spain, shipload after shipload of new world gold and silver. So many tons of new world precious metals, in fact, that all of Europe was experiencing a suffocating financial inflation. This inflation resulted in the prices charged for all commodities, the basics of human existence, to rise to such a level that the poor could no longer afford to buy food. The poverty of the poor became total.
While the English in the northern colonies are most remembered for their search for religious freedom, nearly all English colonists sought freedom from England’s oppressive and debilitating poverty and its stifling political tyranny.
Although very little gold or silver was discovered anyplace in the original thirteen colonies, easy to mine iron ore, in bogs and dried-up ancient lake beds, turned out to be nearly ubiquitous. Iron ore and iron smelting, usually accomplished in easy-to-construct back yard “bloomery†smelters, became a reliable means for making ends meet for poor land holders, recently freed from their status as indentured servants. A century and a half later this great abundance of iron, along with the equal abundance of those resources needed to produce iron and steel, that is, trees, rivers and beds of pure white lime, would result in the birth of a great nation.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century England’s cities were teeming cesspools of unemployed, impoverished victims of “enclosure†and industrialized machine manufacturing. Enclosure had allowed wealthy landowners to force peasant families off the land their families had farmed for generations, and machines caused masses of industrial workers to become obsolete.
At the same time North America had been discovered, and was being explored by English adventurers. The new land seemed to promise infinite land and infinite resources free for the taking for any Englishman who could get there.
About a century earlier Spanish Conquistadors had conquered much of Central and South America, and had discovered, and transported back to Spain, shipload after shipload of new world gold and silver. So many tons of new world precious metals, in fact, that all of Europe was experiencing a suffocating financial inflation. This inflation resulted in the prices charged for all commodities, the basics of human existence, to rise to such a level that the poor could no longer afford to buy food. The poverty of the poor became total.
While the English in the northern colonies are most remembered for their search for religious freedom, nearly all English colonists sought freedom from England’s oppressive and debilitating poverty and its stifling political tyranny.
Although very little gold or silver was discovered anyplace in the original thirteen colonies, easy to mine iron ore, in bogs and dried-up ancient lake beds, turned out to be nearly ubiquitous. Iron ore and iron smelting, usually accomplished in easy-to-construct back yard “bloomery†smelters, became a reliable means for making ends meet for poor land holders, recently freed from their status as indentured servants. A century and a half later this great abundance of iron, along with the equal abundance of those resources needed to produce iron and steel, that is, trees, rivers and beds of pure white lime, would result in the birth of a great nation.
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