Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [129]
London responded by passing increasingly draconian laws prohibiting British and Irish artisans from migrating to the United States. By the early nineteenth century, no would-be emigrant could board a ship in Liverpool or other British port without a certificate signed by the “Churchwardens and Overseers” of his parish declaring that he “is not, nor hath ever been, a manufacturer or artificer in wool, iron, steel, brass, or any other metal, nor is he, or has he ever been, a watch-maker, or clock-maker, or any other manufacturer or artificer whatsoever.” Penalties included loss of nationality and confiscation of property. If caught in the act, an illegal emigrant could be convicted of treason.
Such measures were not unique to England. Venice sequestered its glassblowers on the island of Murano, threatening potential emigrants with the death penalty. At one time or another in the eighteenth century every European country passed anti-emigration legislation (even while often sending spies to recruit skilled workers from rival powers). In Germany, emigrants were required to obtain—and pay dearly for—permission to leave. Tracts were published describing horrific poverty in America. One such account claimed that German immigrants to America had become so poor that they had to “give away their minor children,” who would “never see or meet their fathers, mothers, brothers, or sisters again.”10
But the tide of European immigration could not be stemmed. Determined Americans—both private entrepreneurs and government officials such as the secretary of the treasury Alexander Hamilton—found ways to counter anti-American propaganda abroad and to circumvent European restrictions. Letters from America to friends in the Old World spread the word:
[Anyone], in any vocation, manual or mechanical, may by honest industry and ordinary prudence, acquire an independent provision for himself and family; so high are the wages of labour, averaging at least double the rate in England, and quadruple that in France; so comparatively scanty the population; so great the demand for all kinds of work; so vast the quantity, and so low the price of land; so light the taxes; so little burdensome the public expenditure and debt.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, more than 2.5 million “illegal emigrants”—illegal not in the sense of violating American immigration laws, which were virtually nonexistent, but of violating the laws of their home countries because they possessed prohibited skills—found their way to America from the Old World. Most of America's cotton mills were managed by experienced English immigrants. As late as 1850, three-quarters of the skilled weavers and textile workers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, were new arrivals.
In large part because of immigrants, many of whom brought training and expertise acquired from years of working in Europe's factories, American industry exploded in the nineteenth century. One of the most critical contributors was Samuel Slater, often called the father of America's industrial revolution. As a teenager in England, Slater worked as an apprentice in a textile mill that used the innovative new spinning machines invented by Richard Arkwright. Quick and perceptive, Slater was soon promoted to overseer. But Slater could not resist the stories of America's bounty. By pretending to be a farmhand, Slater crossed the Atlantic, arriving in America without any technical drawings or equipment.
Reconstructing it by memory, Slater essentially transferred the world's most advanced textile technology from Britain