inveighed against American piracy, what so offended them was not the reprinting itself so much as the systematic and proud manner of its pursuit. The Americans, Collins said, made "robbery" into "the basis of national aggrandizement." In essence, he was right. Since before the Revolution, reprinters had stressed the propriety of their enterprise, arguing that they were spreading enlightenment in the face of corrupt and monarchical monopolists. After i8oo, the practice had become part and parcel of the so-called American System. This system became a leading candidate for economic orthodoxy in the wake of the War of 1812. Its central element was an insistence that manufacturing, properly considered, exhibited a "harmony of interests" with agriculture and trade. But whereas trade and agriculture were relatively well developed in the United States, manufacturing remained vulnerable to European domination. Policy should therefore be directed to enhancing manufactures and resisting European - that is, British-depredations. Three means should be used to this end. The first and most important was the appropriation of ideas, machines, men, and skills, by any and all means, while protecting American industries by tariffs on imports. British artisans would take any opportunity to come to America, Carey thought, and he even issued his own guidebook for those considering the move. The second was the provision of financing for new projects. And the third was the promotion of "internal improvements," especially canals. In every respect this program was radically opposed to the orthodoxies of British political economy after Adam Smith. It was anti-laissez-faire, anti-free trade, and orientated toward factory rather than agrarian production. And Carey was acknowledged as its leading architect. He authored treatises, badgered possible converts, encouraged the formation of new waves of societies, and traveled up and down the coast in pursuit of the cause. He also sought to reform the publication regime to circulate such knowledge.60 It was this effort that not only embedded "piracy" as national political economy, but created the political economy itself.
By the mid-i8ios, Philadelphia manufacturers were acutely anxious that Britain, emerging from the long years of Napoleonic war, was about to launch a determined effort to destroy them. At Westminster Lord Brougham confirmed their fears when he called on British factory owners to sell at a loss inAmerica so as to stifle the manufacturing that, "contrary to the natural course of things," had grown up there.61 American newspapers seized upon Brougham's impolitic avowal, and as it circulated from reprint to reprint it created a furor amid a population suffering a serious economic downturn.62 Carey in particular responded, redeploying print in the cause of the American system-a cause he declared as important as any "since the organization of the government." It amounted to "the mighty question, whether we shall be really or nominally independent." He handed over his business to his son, Henry and threw himself into organizing and authorship. Carey cajoled readers to support a phalanx of associations: the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry, the Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of American Manufactures, the Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and the Mechanic Arts, and more.63 A Society for the Dissemination of Useful Knowledge would seek out, reprint, and circulate gratis British (and a few American) tracts "calculated to advance the best interests of society"And his Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Internal Improvementyet another band- sent an engineer named William Strickland to Britain to gather techniques for building railroads and canals. Strickland'sReports were published (with copyright, for once) by Carey's firm, as much to bolster a jaded "public opinion" in the possibilities of improvement projects in general as to convey specific technical information.64
Carey gave his commitment to internal improvement a name. This was a habit of his;