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

In a series of short chapters, Trade Secrets takes the reader on a multidisciplinary tour of the economic ideas and pragmatic policy concerns about the persistent need for labor, skill, and technology in the revolutionary and early national generations. The narrative is grounded in the familiar historiographies about the scarcity and high costs of North American labor, the urgency of establishing American manufactures without the supposed corrupting influences of foreign luxury, the rising pressures on policy makers to satisfy consumer demand, and abiding concerns about American political stability in a contentious Atlantic world. But even as Ben-Atar affirms the general contributions of the large scholarly fields of industrial, market, and consumer revolution studies, and relies on the more recent studies of scholars with related concerns such as David Jeremy and Larry Peskin, his central argument takes early American historians into less familiar terrain about the thorny matter of intellectual property.

As long as North Americans remained in the British Empire, Ben-Atar argues, they enjoyed the relatively free flow of ideas, goods, and technologies, despite efforts of mercantilists to craft patent laws to protect original inventors. Intellectual piracy prevailed, and foremost among its advocates was Benjamin Franklin. Patents and temporary monopolies on machines and processing equipment, argued Franklin, might spur would-be inventors, but they had little role in the overall benefits of satisfying the needs and wants of a rapidly expanding people such as the empire boasted. Franklin and others were convinced that the most useful and sought-after intellectual property in the early Atlantic world was related to agricultural, not industrial, invention, which was in turn suited to the character of virtuous Americans. But even in the case of textile manufacturing, talk about "republican simplicity" was far less important than the desire to secure technology and labor to produce textiles. It seemed to make sense, then, to promote the free flow of skilled artisans and new machines throughout the Atlantic world, whatever other policies mercantilists advocated. Indeed, few early modern writers knew how to define the ownership of ideas and few cared about identifying original inventors.

Postrevolutionary expectations about the rise of American manufacturing tested this attitude toward intellectual property, especially as Americans struggled to recover from a debilitating war and dire shortages of skilled white labor. Yet, as Ben-Atar argues compellingly, there was no rapid movement toward restricting the free flow of ideas, people, or technologies, no great swell of nationalist protectionism. Here, Ben-Atar follows the existing historical narratives about international commerce and migration during the first postwar years, from which we have learned that despite the sense of urgency about building a self-sufficient political economy to overcome the turmoil of disrupted networks of goods and credit, American merchants and manufacturers actually returned to British markets with enthusiasm. For years, a number of policy makers, merchants, and publicists would repeat the Franklinian refrain, and for years, they would remain more attached to the export of staples than to initiating ambitious manufactures.

An undercurrent of opposition became evident by the late 1780s, embodied in the writings of men such as Tench Coxe, Mathew Carey, Albert Gallatin, and Alexander Hamilton. The economic realities of North American invention and manufacturing, they argued, required national boundaries on intellectual property. In part because American manufacturers (and, we might add, some ambitious commercial farmers) could not compete with the pace of British industrialization, in part because of the shortage of capital in America, and in part because of widespread business failures in the mid-1790s (especially in the all-important area of textiles), the heralds of national self-sufficiency wished to regulate the free flow of intellectual property. At the same time, British policy makers also intensified efforts to dam up the flow of skilled artisans and industrial plans out of England. Yet Ben-Atar finds that such regulation was less successful than its architects had...