The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

PURSUIT OF ALBION^235

wrote a German traveler circa 1800, pales before that of the Briton, as

the shadow before the light."^7 And a French visitor, the comte de

Mirabeau: "Accustomed as [the British] are to calculate everything,

they calculate talents and friendship. ..."

(To this day, the French like to think and pretend to others that

they do not care for money. They are not alone: idealism is the affec­

tation of those who feel they have less than they deserve in the pres­

ence of those who have more. In the eighteenth century, Continental

observers saw the English as great materialists. A hundred years later,

the Americans became the new target of obloquy, the British now join­

ing their erstwhile critics in scorning these nouveaux riches.)

In short, you couldn't trust these Brits.^8 Some French took comfort

in antique precedent: Britain was the "modern Carthage"; France, the

heir of Rome. In the last analysis, an island-nation of rootiess traders

(shopkeepers) could not hold its own with a solid, terra firma king­

dom. Another big mistake.

In the European world of competition for power and wealth, then,
Britain became the principal target of emulation from the beginning of
the eighteenth century. Other countries sent emissaries and spies to
learn what they could of British techniques. Merchants and industrial­
ists visited the island to see what they could. Governments did their
best to stimulate enterprise by the usual array of incentives: subsidies,
monopoly privileges, exemptions from taxes, assignment of labor,
bribes. Such efforts had mixed results, pardy because these very en­
couragements, by their partiality, prevented or retarded the diffusion
of techniques; but even more because the follower countries were not
yet ready to learn and adopt the new mode of production. What's
more, just about the time when the Continental countries became
aware of the extent of the British lead and were making their first, ten­
tative gains in the crucial cotton manufacture, the French Revolution
brought political turmoil, interrupted communications, and imposed
a time-out. Not absolute: intervals of peace, partial or general, per­
mitted British expats and Continental competitors to get on with the
task—to introduce machine spinning, for example, in the southern
Netherlands (Ghent and Verviers) and northern France. Innovation
was necessarily spotty, however, and the technologies were already out
of date. Not until the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 brought
a definitive end to the fighting could Europe get on with the process
of catch-up. (There is no street named Waterloo in Paris, nor
Napoléon, for that matter.)