Patents for invention: setting the stage for the British industrial revolution?

The importance of patents for economic development in general and for British industrialization in particular remains an unresolved issue, but one that during the past twenty-five years has benefited from intensive historical research. This paper re-examines the debate in the light both of that research and of revisionist histories of the British industrial revolution. It focuses on the nature and operation of the English patent system during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, prior to its reform in 1852. First, it re-examines the upward trend in patenting that begins in 1762 and coincides neatly but deceptively with the classic industrial revolution. Second, it investigates how much inventive activity was conducted beyond the patent system and is consequently not captured by the patent statistics. Third, it suggests we should think of the patent system as a technology in its own right: as with all technologies, it was shaped by the circumstances of its invention and development. It was a product of a period that was redefining property as subject to exclusively private ownership, and to this "intellectual property" was no exception. Unless we recognise that a patent, first and foremost, created a piece of private property, we are missing the point. Patenting had at least as much to do with investing as inventing; as much to do with capitalism as creativity. In conclusion, the paper reverses Douglass North's famous causal claim, arguing instead that the industrial revolution "set the stage" for the patent system.