Wrought iron was the backbone of Britain’s Industrial Revolution — used to build railways, bridges, ships, and machines that powered the 18th and 19th centuries. At the heart of this transformation was a technique known as the Cort Process, long credited to an Englishman — but that origin story is now under serious reconsideration.
Were Jamaican ironworkers the missing link in one of Britain’s greatest industrial breakthroughs? A forgotten chapter is coming to light.
In the late 18th century, Britain’s industrial growth accelerated thanks to a breakthrough iron-refining technique patented by Henry Cort in 1783 and 1784. A former naval administrator turned ironmaster, Cort’s method allowed for the large-scale production of malleable wrought iron — a material essential to building the empire’s infrastructure. For over two centuries, he has been celebrated as a pivotal figure in industrial history.
That narrative, however, is being re-examined. In 2023, Dr. Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science and technology at University College London, published a peer-reviewed article in History and Technology that brought new archival evidence to light. Her research argues that the real origins of the Cort Process may not lie in Britain, but in Jamaica.
According to Bulstrode’s research and corroborating colonial-era documents, a group of 76 highly skilled Black metallurgists — many of West African origin and some enslaved — developed a method of converting scrap and pig iron (see Glossary) into high-quality wrought iron at a foundry near Morant Bay in eastern Jamaica. Their work appears to have preceded Cort’s English patent filings by several years.
These men were not simply laborers; they were experts. Drawing on centuries-old metallurgical traditions from West and Central Africa, they adapted their knowledge to Caribbean conditions and refined iron with remarkable efficiency using minimal equipment. Surviving names from colonial records include Devonshire, Mingo, Friday, Captain Jack, Kofi (Cuffee), and Kwasi (Quashie). Their white overseer, John Reeder, admitted he was “quite ignorant of such a business,” describing them as “perfect in every branch of the Iron Manufactory.”
Henry Cort was deeply in debt and seeking ways to make iron production more profitable. Bulstrode suggests he may have learned of the Jamaican process through a cousin involved in colonial trade. Whether through personal networks or more coercive means, this knowledge appears to have been transferred to England, where Cort patented a similar method and received credit.
Bulstrode’s research also indicates that the Jamaican foundry was seen by British authorities as both economically and politically dangerous. It was highly profitable — she estimates its output at the modern equivalent of over £7 million per year, based on surviving production and value records. Its ability to produce tools and weapons was a threat in a colony with a long history of resistance.
She argues that the ironworks was eventually dismantled under martial law. Its equipment — and possibly some of its metallurgists — were transferred to England. Although direct documentation of this transfer is lacking, the pattern aligns with broader colonial practices of appropriation and erasure.
The metallurgical traditions carried to Jamaica were part of a much older legacy.
Before turning to the story of Jamaica’s 76 ironworkers, Bulstrode frames her groundbreaking 2023 research within a much deeper African metallurgical tradition. She opens her study with a scene from 1494, when the German traveler Hieronymus Münzer visited Lisbon and saw Black artisans in the Portuguese royal ironworks forging anchors, cannons, armor, and marine tools on a scale that astonished him. He likened them to “cyclopses in Vulcan’s cave.”
This image reflects centuries of entanglement between African skill and European technological development. Many Africans trafficked to Jamaica came from the Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, and the Gold Coast — regions with long-established ironworking cultures. Their craft was both technical and spiritual, with iron tied to ritual power and ancestral traditions.
Far from being mere laborers, these 76 Jamaican metallurgists were heirs to that legacy. They adapted and evolved their methods in a new environment, creating an innovation that reverberated globally.
For centuries, the Cort Process has been treated as a British invention, an emblem of white industrial genius. But if Bulstrode’s findings hold, it was an innovation born in Jamaica from African knowledge systems and developed under the violence of slavery.
The article sparked both praise and controversy. In November 2023, the editors of History and Technology issued a formal statement affirming the study’s scholarly rigor, noting that it had passed peer review and met all academic standards.
As Bulstrode writes, recognizing innovation “based on use rather than ownership” allows us to see who truly drove progress — and who was written out of its story. In this case, 76 Black metallurgists in Jamaica may have authored one of the most consequential technological breakthroughs of the modern era, only to have their names scattered and their legacy buried by empire.
Today, efforts are underway to recover that legacy — to restore these ironworkers to their rightful place as inventors, innovators, and engineers who shaped the world beneath the shadows of history.
Pig Iron: Pig iron is a crude form of iron produced by smelting iron ore in a blast furnace. It typically contains a high carbon content—between 3.5% and 4.5%—which makes it brittle and unsuitable for most direct applications. The name derives from the traditional casting molds used, which resembled piglets suckling from a sow. Pig iron must be further refined to reduce its carbon content and remove impurities before it can be transformed into usable wrought iron or steel.
