A positive shock to a society’s supply of human capital can come from exogenous and unanticipated immigration. One such case arose from Louis XIV’s precipitous revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which forced French Calvinists – Huguenots – to convert or to flee. Many fled to the Protestant regions of Germany, where – owing to the Huguenots’ renowned expertise and entrepreneurship – they contributed greatly to subsequent economic development. Only some of Germany’s many Protestant cities, however, welcomed the refugees. Analysis of sixty cities’ attitudes contradicts the idea that powerful guilds opposed, or that pre-existing human capital favored, the admission of the Huguenots. Rather, a city was likelier to welcome them the closer it lay to a major trade route, or the more of its population it had lost in the Thirty Years’ War. Territorial rulers almost unanimously welcomed the Huguenots and often compelled reluctant cities to admit them. Animated by the ideas of Seckendorff, rulers saw in the Huguenots both a welcome influx of human capital and a way to undermine the craft guilds, which Seckendorff regarded as a major impediment to economic growth.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Seventeenth-century France was not a place of religious tolerance or inclusion. Jewish people were permitted to settle, under certain restrictions, in parts of the country, and France enjoyed trading and diplomatic relations with, notably, the Ottoman Turks. But both Judaism and Islam were regarded with great suspicion in a country that claimed to base its unity on having one faith, one law and one king. For this reason, the French Protestant (or Huguenot) community came under increasing levels of persecution in Molière’s lifetime. Even within the Catholic Church, there was considerable tension. Louis XIV’s authority was threatened by that of the Pope in Rome and, in France, by the Jansenists, who did not recognize the King’s right to pronounce on matters of individual conscience. More generally, France was steeped in a wider conflict between those who believed that religion should guide all areas of daily life (the dévots) and those who adopted a more relaxed view (the mondains). Although there is no reason to think that Louis XIV objected to Molière’s portrayal of religion and religious hypocrisy in his famous comedy Tartuffe (1664–9), the play thus became caught up in a much broader struggle for religious and political authority.

This chapter introduces Part II, on Pierre Bayle. It provides an intellectual-biographical account of Bayle’s career, emphasising both his deep immersion in circles of Reformed scholars and theologians, and the reactive dimension of his writing, which were almost always shaped by his most recent reading. It urges caution about trying to find a coherent system in all of Bayle’s writings, and instead presents a framework for a developmental account of his thought. It also introduces the historiographical debate about Bayle, and the so-called ‘Bayle enigma’. It suggests that that enigma can be dissolved even if we carefully place Bayle in his own context, and avoid misleading categories such as ‘scepticism’ and ‘fideism’.

Chapter 1 focuses on the transnational networks of the three English republican exiles. It follows Ludlow, Sidney and Neville on their journeys to the Continent and shows the extent to which the refugees relied on pre-existing networks formed during earlier periods of their lives through their families, their education, their religion and their political activity, and on new connections forged during their travels. Ludlow made his way to Geneva with the help of French Huguenot acquaintances and subsequently benefited from their wider religious networks in Switzerland. Sidney in contrast had to leave a diplomatic assignment in Copenhagen without much preparation and initially moved to Rome on a whim, recovering old and forging new connections among the religious establishment soon after his arrival. Neville was the last of the three to leave for the Continent after being arrested for his suspected involvement in a plot to restore the Commonwealth in England. As a prisoner in the Tower, he made arrangements with the Earl of Clarendon to retreat to Italy, where he was to benefit from the hospitality of the Medici Grand Duke Ferdinando II as well as from the anonymity enjoyed by foreigners in Rome.

Chapter 2 focuses on the local support the three exiles found in their newly adopted communities on the Continent and in particular on the complex religious dimension of their European networks. Ludlow was moving mainly in Reformed Protestant circles, as might be expected from an English Puritan refugee, and Sidney too would seek his associates mainly among Dutch protestants and French Huguenots and former Frondeurs. Yet both Sidney and Neville also spent significant time in Italy, especially in Rome as the centre of the Catholic world. Their networks show that political allegiance could not always be related one-to-one to a specific religious creed and that personal friendships often cut across supposed political and religious divides. However, both Sidney and Neville also pursued a political agenda while in Rome, moving in circles that would allow them to gain insights into the future relations between the Stuart monarchy and the Catholic Church, while also shaping their own journey towards religious toleration.

This contribution focuses on early modern refugee artisans, and their families, who engaged actively with print culture while cobbling together spiritual ideas, natural philosophies, local scientific knowledge, and dexterous craft skills during the earliest years of the industrial revolution. It provides a “deep” history of the little-known entrepreneur Jacques Fontaine (1658–1728), a Huguenot refugee. Together with his wife and sister-in-law, Fontaine invented a small fire machine to produce a cheap imitation-silk finish on a common woolen textile. Fontaine’s experiences working with this commodity embody the crucial strategy of the so-called New Luxuries. This beacme a mainstay of the vast majority of highly skilled refugee Huguenot artisans scattered throughout the Atlantic after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), who elevated local materials of little intrinsic worth to successfully imitate more desirable, expensive, and polite imported goods of greater intrinsic value, while jumpstarting the early industrial and consumer revolutions.

Calvin thus advised the French Reformed communities to await the consequences of King Henry II’s sudden death in a jousting accident several months earlier. French Calvinists (hereafter called Huguenots) could hope and pray that the late king’s policy of repression might change under his successor. With the historians’ gift of hindsight, however, we know that the opposite occurred: Henry II’s death catapulted France into an extended period of political, religious, and social upheaval that encompassed the second half of the sixteenth century. We also know that during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), Huguenots did not “possess [their] souls in patience.” They suffered greatly, but they also organized and fought against their Catholic opponents, defied the French crown, and ultimately became a protected if vulnerable religious minority in a Catholic kingdom.