Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (review)

At its core, Trade Secrets is a story of ideas, policies, and outcomes that focuses on British North Americans' evolving attitudes toward the importation of technology—mainly from Great Britain, but also from Europe—during the colonial and early national periods. Based on archival research and printed sources, and integrating intellectual, legal, social, political, and social history, Doron S. Ben-Atar's story is solid on the ideas and policy developments, but not quite as solid on the outcomes. Operating between two opposing ideas of intellectual exchange, the North Americans employed mostly private sector efforts to bolster American industry with imported technology and immigrant artisans. Meanwhile, the colonial governments, and later the state and national governments, struggled to find a coherent policy toward "technology piracy." Ben-Atar argues that American government policy was contradictory: on the one hand, to legitimize itself in the international arena the new nation could not actively promote technology piracy, yet on the other hand, it did little to discourage such piracy and implicitly encouraged it. While slow in the beginning, the story picks up its pace once its author gets to the post-Revolutionary era. Toward the end, however, the author makes some claims for his story that are not fully supported in the analyses. Still, this is an important contribution and should be folded into our narrative of early industrialism in the new nation.

Ben-Atar employs the term "technology piracy" in a modern sense, noting that the historical actors did not understand their actions as "piracy." In chapter 1, he furnishes a brief overview of intellectual property from the Greeks forward. He argues that natural rights and utilitarian arguments combined during the Enlightenment to bolster patent monopoly systems, but he notes that each approach contradicted the other. Governments during the eighteenth century ignored the natural rights argument and relied on the utilitarian approach to sustain support for technology piracy in order to enhance the economic wealth of the state. Chapter 2 reviews the conflict over technology transfer within the British colonial system, a conflict similar to the ones underlying the economic relationship between the metropolis and the colonies—were the colonies dependent or interdependent within the empire? Thus, while continuing to promote theft of intellectual property from other nations, the Board of Trade vacillated between promoting technology in the colonies and preventing the colonies from taking advantage of British innovations. Generally, in the seventeenth century the Board of Trade promoted interdependent actions, but in the eighteenth century it attempted to block exportation of technology and skilled artisans to the colonies. Internally, the colonial governments struggled with the issues of patents—should they be given only to the inventors or could they be given to innovators and introducers of others' ideas? And although revolutionaries wanted to separate from England politically and socially, they very much wanted to employ the English technology to promote industrial expansion.

Chapter 3 argues that Benjamin Franklin favored (and practiced himself) the free diffusion of new ideas. Franklin's ideas, however, were not adopted by the new nation. In chapter 4 Ben-Atar describes how Americans worked to steal intellectual property from the British in order to bolster American industrialism. For the most part, individuals and voluntary associations in the private sector promoted this theft; they sponsored agents in Britain and Europe to find not only machines to export to America but also skilled immigrants to operate them. Chapter 5 traces the tenuous government attempts to promote technology piracy. The states were uneven in their approaches, sometimes awarding patents and sometimes loans; overall, however, Ben-Atar leaves the impression that this approach was less than successful—it was individuals in the private sector who did most of the work to import technology and to encourage the immigration of skilled artisans. Meanwhile, the central government, under the Articles of Confederation and later under the Constitution, discussed but did not implement protechnology piracy...