Introduction

The industrialization of Britain transformed the economic landscape of the world. From the late eighteenth century, British economic success was emulated, initially in Europe, but then around the globe. While historians no longer consider industrialization as a straightforward transplantation of British technology and now view it as a complex amalgamation of foreign and indigenous knowledge, techniques and institutions, there is little doubt that in many parts of the nineteenth-century world there were numerous attempts to introduce British machines and methods. The literature on early French industrialization, for example, is replete with stories of espionage, recruitment of British skilled workers, transfer of British know-how and the importation of British inventions.