ABSTRACT
The Swedish efforts at industrial espionage in Britain over the eighteenth century came nearest to challenging those of the French. The generally friendly relations between Britain and Russia during the eighteenth century, commercial treaties and growing trade, made for a friendlier reception to Russian industrial travellers and trainees than was given to the French, whose country was so frequently an enemy. The attitude of the British authorities was relatively relaxed, even indulgent, towards Russian attempts to acquire technologies, particularly as compared with French ones. The Swedish authorities had more steady and administratively better organized system of surveillance of British technological developments than had the French, certainly before the elder Trudaine came to dominate French industrial policy at midcentury. Other Swedish citizens outside the Bergskollegium and Jerkontoret spied and suborned without conscience, and it was only the limited range of Sweden's resources and of her industrial base that restricted her to the second place in espionage, behind France.
