THE SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY

So far we have referred to western Europe as a single entity, but at various periods some areas were more innovative than others. From the twelfth to the fifteenth century the Italians were in the forefront not only of economic development but also of technological progress. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries this primacy passed to the English and the Dutch. A key focus for analysis, then, is the diffusion of technological innovations from their area of origin to other areas, and the migrations of technicians.²⁵

In 1607 Vittorio Zonca published in Padua his Nuovo Teatro di Machine et Edificii, which included, among numerous engravings of various contraptions, the description of an intricate water-powered machine for throwing silk in a large factory. Zonca’s book went into a second edition in 1621 and a third in 1656, and still the details of the mill were considered a state secret. In Piedmont (Italy), where silk production played a major economic role, law regarded “the disclosing or attempting to discover” anything relating to the making of the said engines a crime punishable by death. G.N.Clark has shown that a copy of the first edition of Zonca’s book had been on the open-access shelves of the Bodleian Library from at least as early as 1620. Yet it was not until nearly one hundred years later that the English succeeded in building a mill for the throwing of silk, and then only after John Lombe, during two years of industrial espionage in Italy,

“found means to see this engine so often that he made himself master of the whole invention and of all the different parts and motions.”²⁶ Critics of this story have pointed out that John Lombe’s journey was really unnecessary because the silk-throwing machines could have been constructed with the help of Zonca’s book.

They are perfectly right when they point out that Zonca’s engravings are in fact more revealing than Lombe’s own patent specification. But they miss the point. The point is, as Oakeshott wrote:²⁷

It might be supposed that an ignorant man, some edible materials and a cookery book compose together the necessities of a self-moved activity called cooking. But nothing is further from the truth.

The cookery book is not an independently generated beginning from which cooking can spring; it is nothing more than an abstract of somebody’s knowledge of how to cook: it is the stepchild, not the parent of the activity. The book, in its turn, may help to set a man on to dressing a dinner, but if it

were his sole guide he could never, in fact, begin: the book speaks only to those who know already the kind of thing to expect from it and consequently how to interpret it.

Even today, blueprints are considered inadequate to transmit full information, and when a firm buys new and elaborate machinery it sends some of its workers to acquire, directly from the manufacturers, the knowledge of how to operate it. Through the ages, the main channel for the diffusion of innovations has been the migration of people. The diffusion of technology has been mostly the product of migrations of human capital.

Cases of individuals who migrated temporarily in order to acquire information about innovations and to bring it back to their own countries were not unheard of before the Industrial Revolution. Nicolaes Witsen, in a passage quoted below, mentions people who went to Holland to study “economical building in the dockyards.” In 1657, John Fromanteel of London went to Holland to learn the art of making pendulum A water-powered throwing mill. Engraving from Vittorio Zonca’s Nuovo Teatro di Machine et Edificii published in 1607. The machine was used to twist filaments of raw silk into long threads that were strong enough to weave. Master throwers owned the machine, employed eight to ten journeymen, and worked for silk merchants on a piece-rate basis.

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clocks as recently invented by Huygens and made by Coster: on Fromanteel’s return his family firm was the first to make pendulum clocks in England.²⁸ In the second half of the seventeenth century, Dionigi Comollo, from Como, according to his own words, “spent many a year in Amsterdam and other main towns of Holland where, at [his] expense and with great care [he] learned how to make woollens in the way the Dutch had newly developed.”²⁹ In 1684 the Republic of Venice sent Sigismondo Alberghetti, Jr, gunsmith, to England in order to learn the new English technique of casting ordnance.³⁰ However, there were obstacles to this type of transmission of skills. Especially in fields where economic interests were at stake, communities and guilds were intractably jealous of their technologies and usually sought to prevent their secrets from being divulged.

Innovations spread chiefly through the migration of skilled craftsmen who settled in foreign countries. For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there is plenty of literature about the French Huguenots and the Flemish Protestants who brought advanced technologies to England, Sweden, and other parts of Europe and set up new trades. The dramatic story of the religious refugee has such an appeal that one is often inclined to forget that not all migrations of skilled workers and innovations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be ascribed to religious intolerance. A number of the Walloons who took to Sweden the new techniques of casting iron cannon in the first part of the seventeenth century were Catholic, and they were for a time allowed to retain their faith as well as maintain priests in their communities.³¹ Although most of the French clockmakers who moved to London in the course of the seventeenth century were Huguenots, John Goddard, of Portsoken Ward, was known as a “papist.”³² The Swedish and Flemish craftsmen who moved to Russia in the seventeenth century and introduced the technique of casting iron guns were certainly not motivated by religious preoccupations.³³ Paul Roumieu, who reintroduced the art of watchmaking into Scotland, was traditionally supposed to have been one of the refugees driven out of France as a consequence of the Edict of Nantes. It has now been established that he had moved to Edinburgh at least eight years before the persecution of 1685.³⁴

This brings us to the question of the forces behind the mobility of skilled labor in preindustrial Europe.

As is customary in such cases, one can distinguish between “push” forces and “pull” forces. On the “push”

side there was the long, grim list of misfortunes that made life unbearable for the preindustrial craftsman:

famines, plagues, wars, taxes, job shortages, and political and religious intolerance. For the average worker life was pretty miserable at best. A small extra dose of misfortune was more than enough to make it unendurable. The attachment of preindustrial workers to a given place was directly proportionate to the quality of their living conditions.

Governments and administrators were perfectly aware of the situation and knew that the loss of able craftsmen had grave consequences for the economy. Decrees forbidding the emigration of skilled workers were quite common in the late Middle Ages as well as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Special attention was given to certain categories of workers whose activity was considered either essential for the safety of the state or particularly important for the economy. The Venetian government, for instance, strictly prohibited the emigration of caulkers, and from a document of 1460 we learn that a caulker who left Venice risked six years in prison and a 200-lire fine if apprehended.³⁵ In those days, however, the effectiveness of governmental control was, of necessity, rather tenuous. The repetitious insistence with which the governments issued decrees threatening penalties for workers who fled the country and refused to return provides conspicuous evidence of the inefficiency of control over emigration. Typically enough, impotence bred ferocity. In 1545 and 1559 the Grand Duke of Florence decreed that workers in the brocade trade who had left the town should return to it. Special favors were announced for those who would comply with the order, and penalties were threatened for those who did not. But in all likelihood the results were unsatisfactory: in 1575 the Grand Duke authorized “any person to kill with impunity any of the

above-mentioned expatriates” and posted a reward of 200 scudi for each expatriate craftsman who could be brought back “dead or alive.”³⁶

The circumstances which “pulled” craftsmen into a given area ranged from employment opportunities to political peace or religious tolerance. Quite often there was also a conscious policy on the part of governments. Administrators not only threatened emigrants but also devised ways to attract foreign craftsmen, especially those who could bring them new industries or new techniques. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the champions of the Drang nach Osten attracted Dutch peasants into eastern Europe with generous grants of good virgin land. As mentioned above,³⁷ in 1230–31 the Commune of Bologna (Italy) attracted 150 artisans with their families and assistants, granting them all kinds of privileges and aid in order to develop the woollens and silk industries. In 1442 the Duke Filippo Maria Visconti brought to Milan (Italy) a Florentine craftsman who was supposed to start “some special work of silk.” The Duke paid a monthly subsidy, exempted the craftsman and all his employees from tax and waived import duties on all raw materials required by the enterprise.³⁸ Colbert was generous in granting privileges, land, and titles to Abraham and Hubert (Jr) De Beche, when he invited them to France to set up an iron industry on the model of that of Sweden.³⁹ On occasion, it was considered legitimate to resort to force, and craftsmen were literally kidnapped. An inquiry by the Bergskollegium in the 1660s into the emigration of Swedish iron masters revealed that a number of workers sailed from Nyköping believing that they were being taken to some other part of Sweden. Instead they were brought to Lübeck, from there to Hamburg, and finally to France, where Colbert was determined to start an iron industry on the Swedish model. A few workers escaped; one of them, Anders Sigfersson, returned to Sweden in 1675.⁴⁰

Of course, it is one thing to lead a horse to water; it is quite another to make it drink. The fact that a person or group of persons with knowledge about an innovation moves into a geographic area does not ensure that the innovation will actually take root in the new environment. It depends on a number of circumstances. The personality of the migrants has to be taken into account as well as their number in relation to the size of the host society. No less important is the nature of the host environment. Many Italian technicians moved to Turkey in the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, taking techniques and ideas with them. Yet no appreciable innovations took root in Turkey. The refugees who moved to England, on the other hand, found extremely fertile ground. The Huguenot clockmakers who taught the English the art of clock- and watchmaking, the refugees from the Low Countries who brought the techniques of the “new drapery” to Norwich, the French glassmakers who established the manufacture of window glass in England⁴¹ soon encountered ingenious local imitators who, by pursuing their ideas along original lines, further developed the foreign techniques and opened the way to more innovations. What makes an environment responsive or not is difficult to determine. At first sight the problem of transplanting an innovation into an alien environment might appear to be merely one of introducing new methods of production and the instruments, tools, or machines appropriate to them. But what is really involved is a particular and more profound condition which can be understood and assessed only in human and social terms.⁴² This notion was glimpsed centuries ago by the Dutchman Nicolaes Witsen, who wrote in his great treatise on shipping, published in Amsterdam in 1671:

It is surprising that foreigners, though they may have studied economical building in the dockyards of this country, can never practice it in their own land…. And this in my opinion proceeds from the fact that they are then working in an alien environment and with alien artisans. From which it follows that even if a foreigner had all the building rules in his head, they would not serve him, unless he had learned everything here in this country by experience, and still that would not help him, unless he

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should find a way to inculcate in his workmen the thrifty and neat disposition of the Hollander, which is impossible.⁴³

As good old Nicolaes Witsen observed, it all depends on disposition. And this allows one to end this chapter, for a change, on a cheerful note. Down the centuries, those countries where intolerance and fanaticism prevailed lost to more tolerant countries that most precious of all possible forms of wealth: good human minds. The qualities that make people tolerant also make them receptive to new ideas. The influx of good minds and a receptiveness to new ideas were among the main sources of the success stories of England, Holland, Sweden, and Switzerland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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