Intellectual Property and National Economies

While a few nations had intellectual property (IP) laws before 1800, many more created them in the nineteenth century, and even more than that waited until well into the twentieth century. When scholars examine different national and international IP regimes, they find not only controversy and apparently intractable debate about the laws’ merits but also seemingly irreducible variety. Two recent books—the edited volume Patent Cultures: Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective put together by Graeme Gooday and Steven Wilf and Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy by B. Zorina Khan—examine the global diversity of IP systems and their impacts on national economies.