Travellers, trainees, and urban transformations: knowledge circulation in the pre-industrial Stockholm metal trades, c. 1750–1820

Urban contexts and town-based groups have long been associated with creativity, innovativeness, and the dissemination of technical know-how. Studies dealing with early modern European towns have recently added important findings on this subject, examining practices of work and knowledge circulation that contributed to improvements in the spheres of craftwork and manufacturing well before the onset of industrialisation. This article builds on such research contributions, and it does so by exploring developments at the fringes of a pre-industrial European economy, namely in Stockholm, Sweden, during the period c. 1750–1820. Using a large collection of sources from the Swedish state archives, and zooming in on the important metalworking sector, it illuminates transnational itineraries as well as localised activities that made the capital into a key node in the Swedish – and indeed European – metal trades. Integrating a large number of working individuals and knowledge-making practices into the discussion, moreover, it provides a good basis for nuancing traditional assumptions of a long stagnation in the Swedish capital during the end of the early modern era.