History Has an Ideology Problem

H istory has always been a contentious field, reflecting the biases of both the historian and society. It is a window into the present as much as into the past. Still, the writer of history must do his best to check and overcome his innate biases. In the words of the 19th-century historian J. A. Froude, “the first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence.” The influence of one’s “own sympathies” cannot be eliminated, but the focus must be on factual evidence. Unfortunately, the modern history profession has all but abandoned this pursuit of objectivity in exchange for progressive ideology. This is most obvious in its embrace of critical race theory and the fatally flawed 1619 Project. A recent controversy in the field exemplifies this focus on ideology over history.

It involves an extensively covered article by Jenny Bulstrode in the journal History and Technology. In her paper, “Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution,” she argues that a crucial 18th-century innovation in the manufacture of wrought iron credited to Henry Cort was stolen from its real developers: 76 enslaved Africans at a Jamaican foundry. It immediately made a big splash in the media, with laudatory coverage from the Guardian, NPR, the New Scientist, and other publications. Bulstrode’s claims that a foundation of British prosperity was purloined from oppressed black slaves fit perfectly into the progressive vision of Western history as built on white supremacy and slavery. Not only that, the paper was written by a prize-winning university lecturer and passed peer review, and the author marshaled a great deal of evidence to support her contentions.

The problem is that she misinterprets sources, reaches insupportable conclusions, and fails to back up her key assertions.

Historians, including Oliver Jelf and Anton Howes, have investigated Bulstrode’s paper and found it lacking. Using the same sources cited in “Black Metallurgists” they argue persuasively that its accusations of thievery and assertions of black invention are unsupported. There are three major claims made in Bulstrode’s paper, each of which must be proven true if her thesis is to hold:

A foundry in Jamaica was using grooved rollers to process scrap metal into wrought iron several years before Henry Cort obtained his patent.

This innovation was the brainchild of 76 black workers at the foundry.

Cort heard about the foundry and conspired to have its groundbreaking machinery shipped to Portsmouth, England.

Unfortunately for Bulstrode, she proves none of those statements.

First, the historical record does not support the idea that John Reeder’s Jamaican foundry used grooved rollers to create wrought iron before Cort’s 1783 patent. Bulstrode bases the claim on a few carefully chosen facts: that the foundry was working scrap iron, that it reaped exceedingly high profits, and that there was a rolling mill on site. None of those facts prove that grooved rollers were used to transform scrap into wrought iron. Foundries at the time commonly worked scrap iron and had rollers to form sheet metal — these are not evidence of innovation. The profits of the foundry are easily explicable: Jamaica was rich in pig iron and charcoal, the island was a captive market owing to mercantilist policies, and the contemporaneous American Revolution forced the British to resupply and repair their ships in Jamaica. We also have the issue of labor cost. Bulstrode asserts that £7,000, which Reeder claimed was the value of his enslaved metalworkers, was “equivalent to a labour cost of £11.2 million in 2020.” This is shoddy historical work, as the £7,000 was the value of a permanent asset — chattel slaves — while the £11.2 million is presented as an annual “labour cost.” The difference between stocks and flows is Economics 101. It is shocking that such an elementary error passed peer review.

Bulstrode’s second claim, that enslaved black metalworkers discovered this revolutionary industrial process, is just as suspect as her first. She spends many pages describing the rich ironworking history of West Africa, as well as its social and spiritual importance there. She talks about the links between sugar and iron in the syncretic slave society of Jamaica and about the use of grooved rollers in the processing of sugarcane. These are interesting discussions, but without proof connecting them to the development of the grooved-rolling process for iron, they are meaningless.

The supposed evidence that Bulstrode does bring to bear to show that the Cort process was the product of Jamaican slaves is deficient. She explains that Reeder, initially a novice in the iron industry, engaged “60 white artificers” to train his enslaved workers in manufacturing, saying that their services were “rapidly” found unnecessary, given the skills of the “Black metallurgists.” Apparently, “a few years” of training counts as rapid. At the same time, Reeder, the proprietor of the foundry, is supposed to have learned nothing from the men he contracted over that time. This beggars belief, given the investment Reeder had in his facility and his contemporaneously attested industriousness.

Bulstrode makes a great deal of one line in Reeder’s papers, in which he describes his enslaved workers as “perfect in every branch of the Iron Manufactory.” In the section that Bulstrode quotes in her paper, she omits the remainder of the sentence from Reeder’s letter. There he states the specific — and limited — tasks that his slaves were capable of. With this additional context, it is clear that these workers are “perfect” only in the particular processes he details. Bulstrode selectively quotes Reeder, deliberately obscuring this list of discrete proficiencies, purely because it weakens her argument. Two more issues undermine her claim. One is that Bulstrode suggests that the grooved rollers used for sugarcane were used on iron, but these were oriented differently than those in the Cort process, rendering them unfit for that purpose. Second, the idea that an 18th-century Jamaican foundry owner would allow his slaves to develop a new manufacturing process — an extremely expensive and time-consuming effort — is unlikely. Bulstrode lays out this insufficient evidence and then, with no additional citations, writes that

the Black metallurgists who ran John Reeder’s foundry saw its old European technology in the light of their present experiences and living histories. They were not bound by European classificatory conventions and their practices and purposes were their own. They tied scrap iron in bundles like sugar cane, heated the bundles in the reverberatory furnace, and then fed them through grooved rollers like those found in a sugar mill. In doing so, they transformed scrap metal into valuable bar iron.

This is speculation that is not grounded in historical fact. It belongs nowhere near an academic journal.

Finally, Bulstrode’s claim that Cort heard of this supposed innovation and deliberately stole it, going so far as to have Reeder’s foundry dismantled under false pretenses and shipped back to England, is total bunk. Bulstrode argues that Cort must have heard about the novel process through his brother, a ship captain who would have told him the story of the killing of Three-Fingered Jack, a formerly enslaved rebel, by a worker at Reeder’s foundry. Not only was the rebel’s killer only tangentially involved with the Reeder estate, it is highly unlikely that such a remote connection would ensure that the description of the grooved rolling process would be conveyed to the foundry owner. The main problem with the assertion that Cort learned of the process from his brother when his brother had arrived in Portsmouth from Jamaica is that Cort’s brother never landed in Portsmouth. The major thrust of the paper is based on a misreading of the primary sources, which refer to a different ship altogether.

With respect to the claim of demolition and transportation, Bulstrode is similarly mistaken. She argues that the British declared martial law as a pretext to disassemble Reeder’s foundry and prevent it from falling into the hands of black rebels. In reality, martial law was declared to protect Jamaica against a seemingly imminent Franco-Spanish invasion, and Reeder’s factory was not shipped back to Portsmouth for Cort’s benefit. It was, according to Reeder’s own petitions to the British government, not shipped back at all, instead being partially destroyed in situ. Even so, Bulstrode has doubled down on these claims in interviews.

Bulstrode has received significant backing from the progressive press as well as from the editors of History and Technology, who took the unusual step of publishing an editorial expressing their “unreserved support” for the paper. This is bizarre for an academic journal, as editors rarely step in to defend an author or refuse to publish a legitimate dissent to a published article. In this case, it is an even starker choice given that the journal has already published a correction to the paper with respect to the claims about Cort’s brother. The editors gloss over this major factual error, dissenting academics are derided as unserious, and the problematic arguments made by Bulstrode are backed without any additional evidence. Why would such a strong step be taken to defend a paper that is clearly lacking in historical rigor? The answer lies in politics.

The History and Technology editorial focuses on the paper’s usefulness in “decentering white actors in formative technology developments of the early British industrial era,” and its problematization of “the concepts of modernization and industrialization . . . help show the close ties between these aims and colonizers’ assertions of geopolitical, racial, and religious supremacy.” Bulstrode’s work is valuable in its argument against “a schema which valorizes EuroAmerican intellects and disallows for non-European peoples as the creators of novel technological practices,” helping to displace “narratives that center the agencies and experiences of white capitalists.” According to the editors, “she brings to this literature an agile analytic by which ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ must be detached from pre-existing ideas of where a particular technology begins and ends.” This is politics, not scholarship.

Bulstrode is a progressive in good standing, focusing her work on “historical perspectives on social justice issues” and seeking “to foreground and centre histories of marginalised sciences.” Her paper has been lauded by fellow left-wing academics. Sheray Warmington, a “Jamaican expert in development and reparations,” gives the game away:

This isn’t just about sugar, tobacco and cotton. It’s about Black intellect and innovation which was robbed from the colonies and used to build the wealth of the global north of today. Again and again we see histories of the industrial revolution present Black people as machines. This story shows Black intellect was the driver of innovation and prosperity. Black intellect, that was stolen. It’s time that theft and the countless other innovations that were stolen from colonised countries are recognised by their former colonisers as a key tenant [sic] of the reparations movement.

This paper and its vociferous defense by progressives in the press and the academy are purely instrumental. The accuracy of the historical claims is secondary to the primary directive, which is to craft a false impression of the past to achieve political aims in the present. The editors of History and Technology say this outright, lambasting the critics who pose a “challenge to what we see as meaningful historical accountability” by insisting on apolitical history based on evidence. It continues:

If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

This is a direct call to politicize historical study and lean into one specific view — the progressive one. If historians are focused on “confront[ing] the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions” instead of on delineating the truth of the past, the profession is lost. This is exactly what history should not be. Unfortunately, in 2023, this is exactly what it is.