One of the greatest challenges in this country's history recurred for over half a century following the American Declaration of Independence. Though a combination of British blunders and French support in the Revolutionary War had helped these states to escape British reconquest, and the Constitution of 1789 promised a future of republican stability, Great Britain had not abandoned its dreams of recapturing its former colonies. Even when such aspirations had become unrealistic, by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, authorities in London still hoped to attenuate American strength in an effort to bolster their own position in the New World. The Americans were far from the equals of Britain, but they remained a potent distraction to the world's leading power, a nineteenth-century version of Cold-War Cuba or Vietnam. And, as in Vietnam, the country's rural, dispersed population made it virtually unconquerable by any enemy who was unwilling to engage in a permanent state of guerrilla war.

Great Britain retained the world's most powerful empire, with a navy that virtually ruled the high seas, as well as possessions stretching from Gibraltar to Bengal. Most critically from the American perspective, British control of Canada to the north and of several key points in the Caribbean to the south threatened to place the young republic in a vise which could prove its death-grip. The powerful British commercial and diplomatic interests in Latin America made that region appear neutralist or even hostile in the event of British-American conflict. Moreover, the many malcontents within the United States--including enslaved Africans, desperate Native Americans, and others--were susceptible to the charms of external powers, which might enable them to overcome the exclusive republic which kept them low.

For their part, most Americans had a range of complaints against Great Britain. Their ships were searched and sometimes seized, together with members of their crew, by British warships. British intrigues in what is now the American Midwest threatened to hem Americans in along the eastern seaboard of the continent. The wounds of the last war were keenly felt, as were the sufferings of the non-English denizens of the British Isles. To a country with so many citizens of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish ancestry, Britain appeared just as much an empire of "captive nations" as the Soviet Union would to twentieth-century Americans of East European heritage.

This was a strange conflict, in which the two adversaries were divided, as George Bernard Shaw would later have it, by a common language and culture. The "bonds of consanguinity" alluded to in the Declaration of Independence were quite real; most of the American population was of British origin, and many of these were only separated from the mother-country by a generation or two. The British-American struggle had all the complexity of a dysfunctional relationship between a parent and a grown child. The members of both Parliament and Congress quoted Locke and Shakespeare in their discourses, including diatribes against one another.

Many young Americans visited Britain at least once, and a good many Britons made the reverse trip, most of them permanently. As in the Cold War, there were a great many "defectors" on both sides, who occasionally played a critical role in the turn of events. They might have symbolic or military importance--Benedict Arnold nearly succeeded in handing an American fort over to the British during the War of Independence--but, just as in the Cold War, the most influential among them provided that intangible, but all-powerful weapon called knowledge.

For it was knowledge which lay prinicipally behind the disparity between British and American levels of development. The embryonic American republic was rich in resources, and well endowed with men of letters, but far behind Europe in terms of commercial technological development. Though Americans were well versed in advanced military technologies (they had gone so far as to develop the world's first submarine, and much of their disadvantage vis-a-vis Britain was quantitative rather than qualitative)they remained highly dependent commercially on the advanced economies of Europe. Though they could hope to play off the European nations against one another, the United States would never be secure in its liberties without a program of development which could enable it to secure its economic, as well as its political, independence.

The genius of Benjamin Franklin contributed greatly to American economic development; but that singular genius was unique, aged, and mortal. Fortunately, a handful of other American technologists began to emerge in the years following the Revolution. Their efforts, however, were not always helpful to the new nation, but rather often resulted in a cocktail of political consequences. Eli Whitney, the subject of another chapter ("Gin and Tonic"), helped to regenerate the dying institution of slavery; Samuel F.B. Morse lived comfortably in Britain while his country was at war with that nation. Moreover, at a time when the technical disparity was so great, America simply did not have the many decades it needed to catch up with Britain and continental Europe. The new nation, vulnerable on every side, needed an artificial infusion of technical knowledge in order to gird its economic strength for the ongoing struggle with Britain. Though the Americans' values, as expounded by Franklin and others, were highly conducive to business, an industrial base to match Britain's required rapid technological development.

Britain, whose early lead in industrial development contributed greatly to its economic well-being, was anxious to maintain its advanced position relative to its rivals. Industrial technologies were jealously guarded secrets, in an effort to prevent imitators abroad from competing with Britain while benefiting from British research and development. Conversely, the United States, as a developing nation seeking to reduce its commercial dependence upon Great Britain, was eager to lay its hands on the new industrial technologies. Modern readers may be tempted to dismiss the importance of these trade secrets, given how much more primitive the technology involved is compared with that of our own age; but a command of advanced textile technologies was no less important in the late eighteenth century than are advanced electronic technologies in the late twentieth.

The key, then, to sustaining American strength was for someone to smuggle the plans for advanced British machinery to America. Fortunately, someone did. The most important of this era's "defectors" was not the legendary Benedict Arnold, but a young man named Samuel Slater, who succeeded in transferring the world's most advanced textile technologies from Britain to America. Disguising himself as a manual laborer instead of a skilled technological expert, he slipped out of Britain and settled in Rhode Island in 1790. At once, the critical importance of technology transfer in American development became apparent. Slater's partners and competitors showed ample skill in finance, marketing, and other areas of business management; but only Slater carried, in the recesses of his mind, the plans for the most advanced industrial equipment of his era.

Slater was not the only individual to smuggle advanced technical information from Britain to the United States in this time period. Francis Lowell, a quarter-century later, managed to copy and perfect the British power loom, for example. But Slater's early and important technology transfer enabled the infant United States to begin on the road to industrial development, the key to an advanced economy.

The United States did, of course, succeed in developing economically and sustaining its fragile independence. The British- American conflict emerged into a full-fledged war only once during the nineteenth century, in the most obscure of all American wars. It took place well before the ancestors of most of today's Americans lived in this country; it lacked the ideological fervor and ferment of the revolutionary period; and the war's end brought resolution to virtually none of the issues which had caused it. This war did not even have a name, only a date (and that only mentioned the year in which war was declared, not the three years of strife which followed).

This "War of 1812" coincided with an equally fervent conflict on the outskirts of Europe, Napoleon's march on Moscow. The two wars actually have some similarities: like Russia, America was an amorphous mass, in which no one center's capture would lead to the surrender of the state. Whoever seized Paris ruled France, and Prussia yielded quickly upon the fall of Berlin; but neither the burning of Moscow nor of Washington was enough to make the inhabitants of vast non-European wildernesses accede to foreign rule.

Today, the War of 1812 is recalled only to a small extent in the American collective consciousness. Plaques recalling the war's battles are scattered along the eastern third of North America--I myself have seen them in the Thousand Islands region of New York, and in a village north of Boston; I suspect others exist in Toronto, Washington, and New Orleans. Most Americans, however, remember little or nothing concerning the War of 1812.

There are a couple of lessons to be drawn from the above account. Slater's achievement (or theft, depending on which side of the Atlantic one calls home) is not of merely historical interest; the utilization by one nation of another's research advances has been a key source of tension in international affairs for several decades. At present, the insistence of developing nations' governments and businesses on technology transfer by their technically advanced partners indicates a shrewd insight into the potential benefits, for emerging economies, of imitating industrial leaders. Moreover, just as Britain attempted to carefully husband its technological advances, so must developed nations today seek to advance their own technological capabilities more rapidly than these can be copied by others.

But, like Tolstoy's War and Peace, this story has a second epilogue. After a twentieth century in which British and American interests have largely coincided, it is difficult to recall that there was ever a time when the two countries were at one another's throats. Americans are more apt to remember the gallantry of the 1940 Battle of Britain than the savagery of the 1812 battle against it. But in its time, the inconclusive war with Britain and the sword-rattling peace which preceded and followed it glowed with blinding intensity. Perhaps, then, this is a lesson that the struggles which we face today with such grim seriousness will someday appear as obscure as the war without a name. This does not mean that they should not be waged, where wisdom and humanity dictate that they must; rather, it means that this should be done with a proper appreciation for the broad sweeps of history, and a transcendent understanding of our place in the historical pageant.