Techno-Nationalism

Chapter 6Export Controls

Throughout millennia, technological innovations have been closely guarded secrets, and rulers have gone to great lengths to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands. These were, in fact, the first attempts at export controls.

Knowledge about special materials, alchemy and manufacturing processes remained shielded for centuries, but ultimately, they leached out into the global commons.

Consider two inventions: gunpowder and the magnetic compass.

Gunpowder was invented in China around the ninth century AD, but it eventually made its way to the Middle East and Europe by the thirteenth century. Coupled with newly invented firearm technology, it would later be used to solidify European geopolitical power throughout the world.

Similarly, the Chinese invented the magnetic compass and achieved impressive feats of navigation, already by the eleventh century, but this technology also found its way to Europe by the fourteenth century.

Gunpowder and the compass both contributed to the conquests of successive European empires—from the Portuguese to the Spanish and on to the Dutch and the British. As we discussed, from this early position of advantage, over the ensuing decades and centuries, a long sequence of technology feedback loops in the West established a small group of countries as the world’s top powers.

Early export controls played a role in industrial development from the eighteenth century onward, as Britain and a handful of other countries actively ...