ABSTRACT
The Law scheme, and the accompanying British recognition that there were important areas of technology in which Britain had a leadership which it was essential not to lose, marked an even more remarkable transition for another reason. In the last two decades of the eighteenth century there was considerable experiment in both Britain and France to produce soda from common salt. Particularly from the late seventeenth century a wide range of English cloths were being imitated in The Netherlands, and increasingly in France from the turn of the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth century France, or the Walloon part of The Netherlands, had been of the greatest importance as a source for the blast furnace and the indirect process in the charcoal iron industry and for the crown and broad processes in flat glass. The very vocabulary of these industries once they had been transferred retained strong traces of their French origin.
