THE WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE^279
crecy, they sent the blueprints to the United States—to no avail. Not
until a team of workmen went over to show the Americans how, could
they get pieces of comparable firepower and stability.)
Here, however, the eighteenth-century agent-recruiter ran up
against a salient characteristic of British industry: the division of labor.
No worker knew more than a small part of the production process.
One French agent, by name Le Turc, alias Johnson in England, com
plained:
No worker can explain to you the chain of operations, being perpetually
occupied only with a small part; listen to him on anything outside that and
you will be burdened with error. However it is this little understood divi
sion that results in the cheapness of labor, the perfection of the work and
the greater security of the property of the manufacturer.^9Although specialization made the task more difficult and costiy, the
game was well worth the candle. Some of this emigration was solicited:
foreign governments paid people to come and helped them set up in
business. But some of the expats moved out of sentiment—like one
John Holker, a disaffected Jacobite who was recruited to France by Di
recteur de Commerce Daniel Trudaine and became a manufacturer of
woolens and textile machinery and Inspector-General of Foreign Man
ufactures. Others had strong personal reasons, like Michael Alcock,
who in 1755-56 wanted to take off with his mistress, plus a little em
bezzled money, leaving wife and partner to face bankruptcy. The wife
eventually rejoined him, and maybe she was part of the scheme in the
first place. In the event, Alcock and his two women apparentiy man
aged to live together in a ménage à trois at La Charité, on the upper
reaches of the Loire River, where Alcock made forgings and hardware
and tried to teach the French something about fine steel.^10
Most expatriates, however, had no urgent reasons to settle abroad.
They did it for the money. The best of them became entrepreneurs of
international scope. Take the Cockerills. The father William, a ma
chinist, was brought over around 1800 to Verviers (then France, now
Belgium), a center of woolen manufacture, by a firm of putters-out
seeking to go over to factory industry. Cockerill was to supply them
with the machine combinations (assortiments) that would take them
from fiber to yarn (doing this by machinery entailed breaking the task
into a sequence of processes). William, who had his own ambitions,
would have happily supplied the whole industry (remember that we are
talking about imperial France), but he was bound by contract to his