Immigrant clockmakers in eighteenth-century Paris

In the eighteenth century, Paris was a center of innovation in clock- and watchmaking, and much of this was due to immigrant craftsmen, mostly from other parts of Europe. My paper asks why this was so. It argues that the prominence of outsiders resulted largely from the encounter between the experience of migration and local conditions in eighteenth-century Paris. Many talented immigrants came from places with traditions of mobility and were keen to learn and to succeed. Rather than bringing new or superior skills, they exploited possibilities offered by the French capital, in particular the ability to work in certain “privileged” locations and the rewards for innovation offered by the French government and the Academy of Sciences. In Paris, they encountered a market where demand for quality and novelty was high, and an expanding trade that had a culture of innovation.