Inventing Foreign Patents in Globalising Europe

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, the patent policies of the upcoming modern nation-states had very different traditions. While Great Britain had the oldest law, France certainly had the most influential one. Moreover, some countries, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, did not have a patent law when the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property was signed in 1883. In other words, the starting positions for patent coordination were extremely different. In this chapter, we will argue that there is a crucial need to sharply distinguish European patent laws before and during globalisation in order to understand the international patent regime. Although the Paris Convention was a powerful agreement that affected national patent regimes everywhere, we argue that international trade since the 1870s was the most important driver for the internationalisation of national patent laws.