Some time ago now, Steven Shapin pointed out the extent to which technicians are often invisible in the history of science. Those who labored at experiments, or prepared and made scientific instruments have not so much been written out, but never written into, the history of science as it has been conventionally told. A little mischievously, Shapin suggests that on the rare occasions when technicians are mentioned by their masters, it has usually been as a way of accounting for a mistake or an accident. More recently, and following Shapin's lead, historians of science have started to pay more attention to the place of technicians, instrument-makers and other skilled manual practitioners in the making of natural knowledge. In this overview I survey the recent literature on artisanal science from the early modern through to the modern period, paying particular attention to what accounts of the place of hand-work in the production of knowledge reveals about the politics of knowledge.