By Scott Longman
The United States has been a superpower long enough that it’s easy to forget that we were once just a belligerent bunch of bastards with dirt, animals, seed crop, plows and guns. To borrow from John Wick: A lot of guns.
Okay, so this might initially seem to be unrelated, but work with me. Have you ever gone to buy a new dresser, and noticed that some of the classic designs have brass escutcheons with a fake skeleton keyhole in them? I once had occasion to spend a lot of time in Colonial Williamsburg, and once ducked into the cabinetmaker’s shop. The period-dressed reenactor was absolutely top-notch and an actual cabinetmaker. He’d been in the process of mortising in a lock in a chest of drawers. I asked him WTF would you bother?
He responded with humor and a lesson on what textile manufacturing was like in the 1700s. Everything was done by hand. Hand shearing, hand carding, hand picking, hand spinning, hand weaving, hand dying, hand tailoring. All of which meant that one good outfit might be among the most valuable things you or anybody you knew owned.
How valuable? One modern estimate notes it would’ve taken at least 500 hours of labor for spinning, about 70 hours for weaving, and perhaps seven of sewing. And that says nothing of the huge effort and expense of growing or raising the raw materials to begin with, nor creating nor applying the dye. Everybody in that process had to get paid. So, assuming only federal minimum wage today (and the skilled crafts would have commanded a far higher rate), that’s a current money $8,000 suit. So damn straight you locked it up when you weren’t wearing it.
Height of the British Empire
The value of clothing was global, unless you were big into sunburn and loincloths. Clothing was and is a market with only marginal elasticity, which meant that it was spectacular for trade. Well, at least if you produced it efficiently. And the British did. Alone.
This is all right out of Economics 101: the Brits’ comparative advantage was huge. And as the world-dominating sea power, they could ship their clothing all over the globe. Wealth, empire, and (one of) the reasons that English remains the most spoken language in the world.
Consistent with its criticality, the Brit textile industry got official government protection. Not merely tariffs, but rather some big-boy-pants stuff: it became a criminal offense to let any textile machinery or documentation out of Britain, essentially making a whole industry a state trade secret. Further yet, it was a criminal offense for anybody involved with the industry to even leave the island at all. Well, then, lad, you’re here for the lot of it, aren’t you?
Growing America desperately needed textile technology. Consistent with Adam Smith’s free market, the U.S. Constitution, and several drums of reagent grade entrepreneurialism, an English young man named Samuel Slater was paying attention.
He’d gotten a raw deal start in life, sent to the textile mills as a laborer at the now-incomprehensible age of 10, and it got rawer when his father died, which led to young Samuel becoming officially indentured at the mill. It was dirty, loud, dangerous and grinding—a life of poverty. And he, over years, figured out his end game. The young man formulated an escape plan: Sam went from merely being a working cog in the machine to instead memorizing and calculating. And he then came up with a plan to Exit Stage Atlantic. As part of that, he’d learned that he had to have a cover-for-status, given that nobody in his industry could leave the island, so he came up with one, as an unskilled laborer.
Fathering a Revolution
His wooden ship arrived under sail in New York in 1789. He understood the difference between selling his services outright versus instead getting a piece of the equity, and he so rightly demanded the latter in his first deal. Really, really good thinking.
He proceeded to develop the first successful textile mill in the U.S., largely directing its physical creation from his memory. He would later go on to create his own firm, and went on to develop another dozen mills, and the towns around them, to include one named after him, Slaterville, RI. Depending on who you want to listen to, he wasn’t a saint: but that’s beyond the point of this piece. Soon, other mills replicated his success, and then that spread beyond textiles. Eventually, he had us an honest to goodness burgeoning industrial revolution.
As soon as the Brits found out about it, they declared him “Slater the Traitor.” That didn’t faze Slater for several reasons. We are paraphrasing his imagined but almost certain real reaction here:
“First, you frothing wankers, I am now an American, so I don’t give a bloody toss.”
“Second, I’ve come from indentured servitude in one of your horrid mills to now owning a passel of them, in a country that shot you until you left. Bitches.”
“Third, there’s this rather impressive bloke, President Andrew Jackson, who was last seen blasting all of your sorry arses out of New Orleans, and with some fanfare at that. Well, he’s seen fit to draw a pint and dub me ‘The Father of The American Industrial Revolution,’ so you can right bugger off.”
That’s a world-class outcome for pulling off just one good commercial espionage operation. Probably never been bettered.
