Samuel Slater, known as the “Father of the American Industrial Revolution,” memorized the designs of British textile machinery and brought the knowledge to the US, where he built the first successful water-powered cotton-spinning mill in 1790. British law forbade the export of textile machinery designs and the emigration of skilled workers. Slater came anyway. America built its industrial base on stolen blueprints.
The Pattern
The US did not initially respect foreign patents. Until the Patent Act of 1836, European inventors found it nearly impossible to enforce their patents in America. There were no international IP agreements. American companies legally replicated European technologies and processes without repercussion. At World’s Fairs, the US showcased inventions “heavily inspired” by European technologies as original American inventions. The Europeans were furious.
From the British perspective, the US was an opportunistic nation leveraging its lack of formal IP protections to bolster its own industrial base — an unethical practice that undermined the investments of European innovators.
The Rhyme
Replace “United States” with “China.” Replace “Britain” with “United States.” Replace “textile machinery” with “semiconductor designs.” The narrative is identical. The moral outrage is identical. The economic logic is identical.
China’s economic model used state-directed investment, financial repression, and technology transfer (voluntary and otherwise) to catch up — exactly as the US used patent non-enforcement, industrial espionage, and tariff protection to catch up with Britain. Every catching-up economy in history has done some version of this: Japan copied American manufacturing, South Korea copied Japanese electronics, the US copied British textiles.
Cultural evolution explains why: no civilization bootstraps from first principles. Knowledge transmission between cultures is how technology spreads. The question is never whether the catching-up economy will appropriate — it is how the leading economy will respond when it does.
The Convenient Amnesia
The paradigm of “rules-based international order” around IP is built by those who have already caught up. The rules were written by the winners after they finished winning using the methods they now prohibit. Britain tried to prevent American industrialization through export controls on machinery and skilled workers. It failed. America now tries to prevent Chinese technological advancement through export controls on semiconductors and chip-making equipment. Whether it will succeed remains to be seen.
The strong gods frame applies: the “rules-based order” is a fox institution — managing through process and narrative rather than acknowledging the raw power dynamics underneath. The narrative that IP theft is uniquely immoral, rather than a universal feature of catch-up development, is itself a form of orthodoxy — a moral frame that happens to serve the interests of the incumbent.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “IP theft is wrong, period.”
The midwit take is “everyone does it — who cares about the rules?”
The better take is that IP protection and IP appropriation are both rational strategies at different stages of development, and the moral framing around each is always generated by whoever benefits from that framing at that moment. Britain’s fury at American copying was genuine. America’s fury at Chinese copying is genuine. Neither fury changes the fact that catch-up economies copy, incumbents protect, and the moral arguments are downstream of the economic interests.
Main Payoff
The next time someone frames Chinese IP practices as uniquely predatory, remember Samuel Slater: a man who memorized proprietary designs, violated export controls, emigrated illegally, and built an empire on stolen knowledge — and whom Americans celebrate as the Father of their Industrial Revolution.
References:
- Samuel Slater and the American textile industry
- Patent Acts of 1790 and 1836
- Great Exhibition of 1851, Centennial Exhibition of 1876