Migration and Expertise: The integration of, and knowledge transfer by, skilled cross-cultural migrants in the early modern period. A new global history project

Felicia Gottmann is a global historian of early modern Europe, France in particular, and her research focusses on the gradual emergence of globalised consumer societies in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe. She is particularly interested not only in the practices of production, trade, and consumption, but especially in the relationship of economic thought and global trade both to the Enlightenment and to the nascent nation state.

Having studied Modern History and French at the Universities of Oxford and Toulouse she gained her D.Phil from the former in 2010. Before joining the University of Dundee as a Leverhulme ECR Fellow in September 2014, she spent four years as Research Fellow at Warwick University's Global History and Culture Centre as part of a team investigating Europe's long-distance trade with Asia in the early modern period.

Felicia Gottmann's talk presents the first outline of a new global history project on skilled migration in the early modern world which will study the interlinkages of migration, technological innovation, and knowledge transfer by investigating the conditions for, and obstacles to, the successful application and diffusion of the knowledge and skills brought by immigrant experts in the early modern world, specifically including non-elite, non-European, and female migrants. Comparative across time and space it will contrast colonial and metropolitan case-studies from Britain, France, the Indian and the German princely states in the period 1680 to 1790, focussing on the most innovative manufacturing industries of the time which had close ties both to formal scientific enquiry and to state-support schemes in an age when nascent industrialisation coincided with interstate rivalries.

• Zeit: 14. November 2016, 16-18 Uhr
• Ort: Historicum der LMU München, Schellingstraße 12, Raum K 226