FRONTIERS^299sought on their own account, to move to high American wages. Here
the North American colonies were helped by their anglophone culture:
Britain boasted the most inventive society in Europe, and British im
migrants felt at home in a society speaking the same language. The
Germans also contributed. The Quakers of Pennsylvania had made it
a point to encourage people of like faith on the European continent to
join them in the New World, and these too (the so-called Pennsylva
nia Dutch) brought with them manual crafts and skills. By comparison,
would-be-aristocratic Virginia, the nostalgic "Old Dominion," with
its large plantations and indentured labor, found it hard to attract such
people; and the crystallization of slavery only made matters worse.
(The technological dependency of the South persisted long after the
end of the Civil War and the transplantation there of manufacturing in
dustry from older centers in the Northeast, usually owned and financed
from outside the region. These enterprises, typically marked by low
output and value-added per worker, were mosriy found in such low-
tech branches as cotton and lumber. This tardy shift has given rise to
diverse explanations, bearing mostiy on natural resources, the low cost
of labor, and the absence of trade unions. Some scholars have seen the
process as an expression of economic colonialism or dependency, and
many would account for the lag by anti-industrial values and culture in
herited from a slave society. To which I would add the paucity of in
ventive activity and entrepreneurial talent.)^11
The American republic was scarcely born when in 1790 Samuel Slater
installed the first working spinning machines in Providence, Rhode Is
land. He was followed by others, and New England, with its strong
streams, became a major center of cotton and woolen manufacture.
Here, as on the European continent, British expatriates were the pri
mary agents of technological diffusion.^12 Yet the character of the re
ceiving society mattered even more. The few carriers who brought the
knowledge found quick students to copy, imitate, and, most important,
improve. When Francis Lowell of Boston introduced the power loom
in 1814, he found a ready workforce, descendants of "many generations
of farmer-mechanics in the workshops of New England."^13
So a few machines came from England, but only a few, and Ameri
cans were soon adapting them to the needs and tastes of the home mar
ket. (They were also inventing new devices and exporting them to
Britain—the best sign of technological independence.)^14 Thus British
cotton spinners used the mule, which called for highly skilled, invari
ably masculine, labor, and concentrated on finer counts of yarn; while
the Americans developed the throstie (derived from Arkwright's water