ABSTRACT

Espionage was generally instigated by the State, though of course often prompted by individuals with industrial interests. French industrialists and administrators were very doubtful that the best British workers were normally recruited. The success and importance of Britain in non-ferrous metal production, in European and even world terms, in the eighteenth century is strangely neglected. The acquisition of skills from Britain was made the more difficult because the French had to try to comprehend all the complications of a coal-fuel technology within a mineral-based economy. A most important difficulty in using suborned English workers to transfer technology to France was the craft nature of virtually all the technology that was attempted to be transferred. The continuous flow of seekers of new and better technology who entered France from England cannot be squared with the suggestions that France was more inventive than England.