The Brigham Smelter in Keswick – Is this the Most Important Historic Industrial Site in Britain?

DETAILS

Speaker: Mark Hatton, (Cumbria Amenity Trust Mining History Society)

Zoom meeting. Opens 19:20, 10 minutes before the scheduled event start time

In the year that William Shakespeare was born, men arrived in Keswick at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth I, to establish a Copper Mining & Smelting operation. These men came from Germany in 1564 bringing technology far more advanced than had been seen in England before. They were granted patents to protect their technology & a monopoly to protect their business model. But the really radical thing was how much capital they had at their disposal and how that capital had been raised. Was this combination of technology, legal protection & large scale private capital the birth of Modernity in the British Isles and the beginning of the age of Capitalism ? This richly illustrated talk looks at the evidence and leaves the audience to draw their own conclusion.