Strains on Europe's Bureaucratization of Violence^177industry in the neighborhood of Berlin, by importing skilled personnel
from Liège (1772), though on a relatively modest scale,^43 also in
volved strategic planning like the French scheme of the 1780s.
What made the Le Creusot-Indret plan different was that Baron de
Wendel and his associates were exploring the potentialities of new,
large-scale industrial methods for the manufacture of armaments. In
this they anticipated developments of the second half of the nineteenth
century, when private entrepreneurs successfully sold big guns and
other weapons to the governments of Europe and the world. De Wen-
del’s connections with the government were rather more intimate than
the later relations between private armaments makers and govern
ments in the nineteenth century. Close collaboration between public
authority and private entrepreneurs for arms manufacture had Col-
bertian roots in France; on a mass industrial scale, however, of the sort
attempted by Baron de Wendel, such collaboration was lastingly
achieved only after 1885.
The fact was that in the 17 80s, if French entrepreneurs were to catch
up with British advances in ferrous metallurgy, the navy offered the
only readily apparent consumer for a vastly increased scale of produc
tion. To transplant the new technology, with its expensive capital
installations, to French soil required an assured outlet for the product.
Otherwise no sensible investor would even consider the idea, since
internal tariffs and the high cost of overland transport had inhibited the
development of a national market in France. In Britain, by contrast, a
nationwide civilian market had already appeared by the 1780s, offering
the new ironmasters of Wales, and soon also of Scotland, a variety of
outlets for their goods. Yet even in Great Britain, Henry Cort justified
his patent for the puddling process by claiming that he could thereby
lower the price of guns for the navy;^44 and during the critical years of
take-off, between 1794 and 1805, the British government purchased
about a fifth of the ironmasters’ product, nearly all of which was used for
armaments.^45
- W. O. Henderson, Studies in the Economic Policy of Frederick the Great (London,
1963), p. 6. - Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History,” p. 477.
- Hyde, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, p. 115. Inasmuch as
some of the iron sold privately ended up in muskets purchased by the government in a
finished or semifinished state from private producers, Hyde’s estimate of 17–25 percent
as the government’s share of the total production of iron is, presumably, minimal;
indeed it seems to me that he systematically underrates the importance of armaments
and state purchasing in the rise of the British iron industry, despite, or perhaps because
of, his sophisticated use of economic measures and concepts. For example: the pioneer
iron foundries in Wales and then in Scotland both started up on the strength of con
tracts with the navy to manufacture cannon. Cf. Harry Scrivenor, History of the Iron