ABSTRACT
Industrial technology moves between countries in many ways. It can be carried by individuals like the Jewish chemists who fled from Hitler and Stalin to Britain and the United States, and by poor immigrants selling the food of their native countries to their hosts. It can travel through the agency of large corporations establishing branch factories, sometimes with government subsidies. It can be passed, like the cavity magnetron, from one country to another as a favour in wartime. It can be transmitted through espionage, by the observations of spies or by enticing skilled workers to emigrate. Different ways of doing things are noticed on holidays or during spells of work experience overseas. All these means of transmission have been discussed in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by John Harris and David Jeremy. 1 All have occurred in the twentieth century. It is the purpose of this chapter to use the food industries as a case study by which to examine the various means by which industrial technology has reached Britain from overseas.
