Economic History: I think this from Jelf and Leslie gets the question of whether there were Jamaican origins to the puddling process for making wrought iron gets it right. There do not seem to have been.

The general rule is that technology transfer is overwhelmingly difficult without and even with extensive written documentation, and usually requires skilled and knowledgeable people with a deep understanding of the processes being adopted. The Soviet government before WWII could not set up its machine tools that it had bought from the U.S. auto industry without the comprehensive and hands-on direction and help from American engineers.

I should not have to say that this is how history is supposed to work: people find things and advance hypotheses, and other people then assess them:

Ian Leslie: Stories are bad for your intelligence <ian-leslie.com/p/storie…>: ‘How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid…. Bulstrode…. My guess is that she came across a few suggestive fragments… and wanted so badly to make them into a story which fitted her ideologically determined prior—that the British stole ideas from those they enslaved—that she got carried away, fabricating causes and effects where none existed. It’s one thing for a young and passionate academic to make mistakes; it’s quite another for a series of experienced academics to let her make them…

Oliver Jelf: The origin of Henry Cort’s iron-rolling process: assessing the evidence <osf.io/preprints/socarx…>: ‘The principal primary sources… do not support the contention that Cort acquired the process from… [the] foundry in Jamaica; nor that the foundry was dismantled and shipped to Portsmouth for Cort’s benefit. The sources instead suggest that… no innovation occurred there; that the chain of events by which Cort is supposed to have heard of the foundry’s activities certainly did not occur… and that no part of the foundry was removed from the immediate vicinity of the island, let alone taken to Portsmouth…

Jenny Bulstrode: Black metallurgists and the making of the industrial revolution tandfonline.com/author/…>: ‘Metallurgy is the art and science of working metals, separating them from other substances and removing impurities. This paper is concerned with the Black metallurgists on whose art and science the intensive industries; military bases; and maritime networks of British enslaver colonialism in eighteenth-century Jamaica depended. To engage with these metallurgists on their own terms, the paper brings together oral histories and material culture with archives, newspapers, and published works. By focusing on the practices and priorities of Jamaica’s Black metallurgists, the significance and reach of their work begins to be uncovered. Between 1783 and 1784 financier turned ironmaster, Henry Cort, patented a process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron. For this ‘discovery’, economic and industrial histories have lauded him as one of the revolutionary makers of the modern world. This paper shows how the myth of Henry Cort must be revised with the practices and purposes of Black metallurgists in Jamaica, who developed one of the most important innovations of the industrial revolution for their own reasons…