ABSTRACT
John Wilkinson and Thomas Williams, the extremely powerful copper industrialist and monopolist, were close allies in business, and Williams seems to have had an identical open and uncaring attitude about foreign inspection of his works. Throughout the early 1780s Josiah Wedgwood was preoccupied by the problem of industrial espionage. In 1784 Wedgwood wrote to Matthew Boulton to recommend to him a M. Genet who was to visit Birmingham on a tour of England. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of action against foreign industrial spies in which Wedgwood was involved was that of the Dane, Ljungberg. The opposition of Boulton to foreign penetration of the techniques and secrets of British industry is distinctly equivocal. The outcome then was nothing more than 'tractations mysterieuses' as Payen justly calls them, and the ideas that Barthelemy had entertained of a great boost to French industry developing from the Boulton and Watt consultancy proved a pipe dream.
