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

Doron S. Ben-Atar wears his heart on his sleeve. It's a good heart, but historically the wrong sleeve. He is rightly concerned with one of the most crucial issues of our time, the global enforcement of Western intellectual-property regimes. While infringement is still sufficiently rife to cost Western companies billions of dollars a year through the piracy and counterfeiting of both goods and software, the successful enforcement of certain corporate patents has devastating effects on people in the developing world. "In the name of protecting intellectual property," writes Ben-Atar, "Western-based companies have marshaled international agencies to enforce their claims with mind-boggling cruelty. Drug patents, in particular, are used to block access to anti-HIV/AIDS drugs in Asia and Africa" (pp. xvi-xvii). Trade Secrets aims to demonstrate that the fledgling United States of America grew rich through piracy of European intellectual property; today's corporate bullies are guilty inter alia of hypocrisy.

Well, yes. It is, however, anachronistic to hang the history of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century technology transfer on this particular peg. Before the Paris Convention of 1883 (which the United States ratified in 1887) there was no international agreement covering intellectual property. At a time when national patent systems were in their infancy and patentees struggled to enforce their rights even within national boundaries, few of them could reasonably expect to benefit from their intellectual property being respected overseas; most countries in fact granted patents of first importation. Consequently, if his invention was appropriated in another country (or on another continent), the realistic inventor could claim to have suffered no material loss; humanity as a whole probably gained. What was both unjust and unrealistic was the British state's prohibition on the emigration of skilled workers as well as on the export of certain types of machinery in a vain attempt to limit foreign competition. Ben-Atar quotes Benjamin Franklin's outrage against these "tyrannical" restrictions on individual freedom of movement, which "make a Prison of England, to confine Men for no other Crime but that of being useful and Industrious" (p. 69).

Franklin's principles coincided, of course, with American interest, but they were well founded in a world that was innocent of visas and migration laws based on nationality. As scholars such as David Jeremy and John Harris have demonstrated, technology was regularly transferred across international boundaries by mobile artisans; England had only recently become a net exporter of technical know-how, after centuries of catching up to the European continent by welcoming such artisans with open arms. Multidirectional "industrial espionage" was normal.

Moreover, an insistence on the role of technological piracy produces an unbalanced account of innovative activity in the early republic, which submerges (to the point of denial) the inventiveness of Americans under the incoming tide of European know-how. Not only did Americans adapt imported British textile technologies to suit their own different conditions, but, as Thomas Cochrane has argued, they also developed technologies in fields that Europeans neglected, not least in woodworking, milling, and steamboat design. There is also a misleading tendency here for "European" to equal "British." It is surprising not to find any discussion, for example, of the French roots of interchangeable parts at the center of the American system of manufactures, which Ken Alder's work has highlighted.

Neither, unfortunately, is Ben-Atar's book a reliable guide to the history of intellectual property and industrialization. To say that "the English state did not grant patents to inventors until 1623" (p. 9) is to postdate the event by over half a century, and only a gross misreading of Eric Robinson's careful work on James Watt's critique of the inadequacies of the English patent system could result in the statement that Watt (and Matthew Boulton) "established the requirement of precise specifications" (p. 6). It is also far from the truth to suggest that...