THE WEALTH OF KNOWLEDGE^281British expats were not alone. The French imported Germans with
metallurgical skills; the Russians brought in Dutch, Germans, and
Swedes. The French crabbed about the Germans—their misbehavior,
their ingratitude. (To some extent, these were the kinds of people who
left home and moved to new jobs.) Here is a manufacturer of scythes
griping about his Germans: in spite of all the advantages accorded
them, he says, in spite of the better treatment, the absence of the mil
itary discipline they knew back home, they work as and when they
please, and "just look for ways to get fired." Not everyone was so neg
ative. One engineer pointed out that the availability of foreign work
ers had a salutary effect on French craftsmen, curing them totally of
"the false principles of independence that too long have led them to re
gard themselves as masters of those who give them their living."^12
(This is a recurrent theme. Employers dislike being dependent on their
workers, and the substitution of capital for labor—thus the original
mechanization of cotton spinning and the imposition of the factory—
was often motivated by considerations of power as well as of money.)*
But money too. Division of labor made it hard for expatriate work
ers to spill all the beans, but division of capital moved some employ
ers to sell their product abroad and educate foreigners in its use. In
particular, the new specialist machine-building industry sought markets
wherever it could find them. British users of these devices under
standably preferred to keep them secret; hence the general ban on ex
porting machinery. (Not steam engines, however, because originally
they were not suited to manufacture. And when, in the 1780s, they
found use in mills, you could not get an export prohibition past Boul
ton & Watt.) This push to sell made a huge difference when comfort
able local producers were not ready to buy but foreign rivals were.
The machine builders, then, were implicitly "subversives," promoting
competition abroad and undermining their countrymen in third mar
kets: "technological self-reliance [by machine users] combined with se
crecy could be an unspoken suicide pact.... "^13
- The classic example is the request made of Richard Roberts, partner in the machine-
making firm of Sharp, Roberts, by a group of Lancashire spinners to build a self-acting
mule, that is, a machine that would bring the spindle carriage back to begin a new
stretch-and-wind cycle. The idea was to tame the mule spinners, the labor aristocracy
of the industry—proud, umbrageous, and difficult in wage negotiations. When a trade
contraction combined with this threat of innovation to curb the workers' pretensions,
the spinners decided they did not need the new machine after all—cheaper that way.
It took ten years for Roberts to make money from his invention. See MacLeod,
"Strategies for Innovation," p. 291.