Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on November 21, 2008
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(1):3-37; doi:10.1093/es/khn104
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French Connections: The International Propagation of Trademarks in the Nineteenth Century
PAUL DUGUID is an adjunct professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and a research professor in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London. Contact information: School of Information, University of California, 102 South Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600. E-mail: duguid{at}ischool.berkeley.edu.
The history of modern brands depends to a significant degree on the history of trademark law, but there are reasons to doubt how comprehensive standard versions of the latter history are. Business, economic, and even legal historians tend to accentuate the importance of the Anglo-Saxon common-law tradition and assume that the continental, civil law tradition followed in its wake. Yet the historical sequence of events suggests that almost exactly the opposite is true. Not only did the French have robust trademark law long before Great Britain and the United States, but the latter two countries only adopted trademark law after signing trademark clauses in diplomatic treaties with France. Drawing on newspaper accounts, public debates, specialist and general newspapers, as well as court cases and diplomatic negotiations, this paper argues that, to a certain degree, Anglo-Saxon trademark law was international before it was national. The evidence suggests that some of the easy verities on which arguments about modern brands, the "second industrial revolution," and institutional economics are based may be more complex than is generally assumed.
Much of the early work for this paper was done working as a research fellow at the Centre de Recherche en Gestion at the École Polytechnique. I am grateful to the center and particularly to Denis Bayart for arranging this opportunity. This work has also been supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Science Research Council of the United Kingdom. I am grateful to them and to Professor Teresa da Silva Lopes and Dr. John Mercer, colleagues for this grant.