Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SILKRAA (The Silk Route Across the Alps. Craftsmen Migrations, Commercial Exchanges & Social Relations Between France & Italy in the Early Modern Period)
Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-08-31
The project explores the socio-economic dynamics of silk weavers’ migration between France and the Italian peninsula during the Early Modern period. By combining migration studies, labour and urban history, gender studies, the history of technology, and material culture, it aims to move beyond traditional interpretations of migration as a form of instability. Instead, it highlights migration as a complex social phenomenon involving individual strategies, networks, knowledge transfer, and cultural exchange. Particular attention is given to material evidence and the gender dimension, often overlooked in historiography. The main objective is to deepen our understanding of professional migration in Early Modern Europe and to develop an innovative interdisciplinary methodology. Specifically, the project seeks to:
1. Analyze the balance between attraction/repulsion policies and integration/marginalization dynamics.
2. Reconstruct the lives and motivations of migrant artisans through archival and material evidence, creating a prosopographic database.
3. Assess the cultural, social, and economic contributions of migration to both countries of origin and destination, demonstrating its key role in the success of the European silk industries
1. Analyze the balance between attraction/repulsion policies and integration/marginalization dynamics.
2. Reconstruct the lives and motivations of migrant artisans through archival and material evidence, creating a prosopographic database.
3. Assess the cultural, social, and economic contributions of migration to both countries of origin and destination, demonstrating its key role in the success of the European silk industries
During the outgoing phase, carried out at Yale University (18 months) and during the secondment at Université Lyon 2 (6 months), the project followed the planned trajectory in terms of knowledge and skills development, scientific output, archival research, source organization, and the planning of subsequent steps. Through active collaboration with the faculty and colleagues at Yale, the researcher was able not only to strengthen expertise in material culture, history of technology, and museology (thanks to the training and courses of Professors Paola Bertucci, Edward Cooke, Lucy Mulroney, and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay), but also to deepen the understanding of the human dimension of documents related to death (post-mortem inventories and wills, thanks to training and seminars with Professors Jane Tylus and Bruce Gordon). In the meantime, through collaboration with the French department, the researcher significantly improved command of the French language, reaching a level sufficient to read and discuss archival sources. This competence proved invaluable during the archival missions carried out in summer 2024 in Avignon, Tours, Montpellier, and Nîmes, as well as during the secondment in Lyon in 2025. These collaborations, together with Yale’s almost limitless resources, also enabled the completion of the preparation of a monograph, forthcoming in open access with Palgrave Macmillan, entitled The Silk Industry in Early Modern Piedmont: The Fabric of Innovation. This book examines the role of innovation in the Early Modern economy and the dynamics of what has been defined as the “innovation ecosystem.” While its focus remains on the Italian peninsula, it addresses all the core themes of the SILKRAA project. During the period at Yale University, several articles were drafted and submitted to leading journals and collective volumes, focusing on specific aspects of the project such as skills dissemination, the migration of skilled female workers, and remuneration. All of these articles have successfully passed peer review and are scheduled for publication in the coming year. The overarching aim of these publications is to revisit widely disseminated historiographical narratives—often shaped by economic history approaches privileging numbers over context—through a microhistorical perspective capable of yielding broader, generalizable insights. In addition, several sessions were organized for major international conferences such as the ESSHC, ASECS, and the WEHC, in collaboration with American and European colleagues. Each proposal was accepted by the organizing committees, actively supported by participants, and attracted large audiences. Through these initiatives and participation in conferences and workshops—ranging from New Haven to Seoul, and including Leiden, Lyon, Lund, and Besançon—the project reached a broad international audience. It drew the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines, including sociology, mobility studies, environmental history, art history, material culture, and the history of technology, regardless of geographical specialization. This demonstrates a genuine commitment to transcending disciplinary and thematic boundaries in order to address the complexities of human experience in society. Textile and silk historians, in particular, have expressed sustained interest in the project and in its forthcoming results. The Lyon secondment played a crucial role in advancing the research. During this period, alongside the production of two articles currently under peer review, significant progress was made in building the project database, which will be completed and published at the end of the project. Participation in workshops in Lyon also provided valuable opportunities to present the project, receive critical feedback, and demonstrate the importance of moving beyond the established historiographical canon. This process involves revisiting and enriching sources, themes, and case studies through the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, environmental studies, and digital humanities. The relevance of this comparative approach lies in its refusal to limit itself to major urban centers. Instead, it shifts attention to less-explored contexts, identifying documents that open new avenues for future research and allowing the integration of local experiences into the global history of production, trade, and consumption. During this outgoing period, the researcher also visited specialized museums and engaged with experts in artisanal textile production, acquiring first-hand knowledge of craft practices. This experience was fundamental to linking material culture, the history of technology, and a practical understanding of machinery with historiographical analysis, thus enabling more accurate contextualization.
This research-in-progress approaches the history of Early Modern textile industries as a dense fabric woven from many different threads. Rather than linear stories of invention, it reveals fragile balances shaped by mobility, institutional and personal ambitions, and everyday strategies of adaptation. Innovation, though crucial, never stood alone: machines and techniques spread only through skilled hands, via the migration of artisans who embodied and transmitted knowledge across borders. Compared to the state of the art, which has already stressed the importance of professional migration and the materiality of technical knowledge, SILKRAA advances in several directions. First, it shifts the focus from the transfer of techniques alone to the broader social and political negotiations triggered by mobility: conflicts between states and workers, strategies to police know-how, and local resistance. Second, it expands the scope beyond highly skilled male artisans, placing gender at the core of analysis and showing how women’s agency actively reshaped access to training, wages, and recognition—an aspect still marginal in migration and labour historiography. Another innovative step is the category of ambition: not only rulers pursuing mercantilist projects through royal manufactories and industrial secrecy, but also individuals—migrant artisans seeking opportunities, or women defending workshop interests—whose personal trajectories often collided with institutional frameworks. In this way, manufactories, guilds, and charitable institutions emerge as true laboratories of negotiation, where hierarchies and categories of value were tested and redefined. What emerges is an industrial world made not only of machines and markets, but also of communities, conflicts, and aspirations. SILKRAA’s advancement lies in weaving together migration and ambition, gender and institutions, technology and politics, thereby producing a more dynamic and uneven picture of industrial transformation than existing literature allows.