Textile Industry Relations and Espionage – Knowledge Spread During the Industrial Era
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper focuses on the knowledge spread and industrial espionage in the textile industry of the 18th and 19th centuries. The paper aims at describing and explaining the main influences and interdependencies among textile factories and entrepreneurs in Europe. Special attention has been paid to the comparison of the situation in Brno, the Czech Republic, and Manchester, the United Kingdom. Both cities are famous for their textile industry tradition. Manchester is a city of many industrial inventions and that is why it suffered numerous attempts for industrial espionage. Brno has been known as the ´Austrian Manchester´, or later ´Moravian Manchester´ due to its dominant position in the textile industry in Habsburg Monarchy. To find out mutual relations and espionage links, methods of literature review, desk research and archive exploration in both case study cities were used. Research results suggest that knowledge and inventions from both Manchester and the UK in general spread mainly to France, the US, and Russia via espionage practices. Significant relations between Manchester and Brno were proved. Manchester served as a place of apprenticeship for entrepreneurs who became businessmen in Brno and also some people active in Brno´s textile industry were originally raised or lived in Manchester (e.g. Paul Neumark´s family). Industrial espionage and brand exploitation have maintained their position of a very fearful condition also in the 21st century due to the interdependency between business activities and usage of the Internet. |
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