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By Root 2074 0

behindpatent reform -as also in the case of copyright-was the aspiration to extend what had always been a purely national practice into the international realm. Since the 183os, Britain had sought to reach agreements with European and American governments on patent and copyright treaties to do this in limited ways.24 The principal rationale lay in contemporary economic doctrine. According to the tenets of political economy, the royalty that users of a patented technology paid to the patentee could be seen as a kind of tariff on domestic manufacturers. Since the existence, terms, and rates of such royalties varied across borders, national patent regimes violated the principles of free trade. For this reason, European powers sought (with qualified success) to create harmonious, or at least reciprocal, patents and copyrights rules. For free trade to operate, the costs of patents to users - including their accessibility, terms, and restrictions - should be uniform across nations. Abolitionists would soon proclaim that the only way to achieve this was to do away with such costs altogether. It is therefore slightly ironic that what gave the initial spur to the antipatent campaign was a move by the British government to do just that in one instance. Specifically, the immediate cause of tension was a new relation that the 1852 law defined between Britain and its colonies. The 1852 law expressly excluded the colonies of the British Empire from having to honor patents filed in the home country 2S Colonial manufacturers could now adopt the latest technologies from Britain without paying royalties.

This decision derived in large part from earlier struggles over slavery, especially in the West Indies. The West Indian colonies had been slaveplantation economies until emancipation in 1834. The owners of sugar plantations there had then faced the prospect of addressing labor costs for the first time. Rivals in Brazil and Cuba still used slave labor, however, and the colonial owners claimed that this put them at a disadvantage, especially after 1846, when London's equalization of tariffs meant that they could no longer count on preferential treatment. The sugar producers attempted to maintain their position by mechanization-many adopted steam-powered mill machinery-but nonetheless a severe depression took hold in the West Indian sugar trade.26 It was in this context that Westminster decided not to extend patent protection to the colonies. The hope, in effect, was that the ability of sugar manufacturers to adopt modern steam machinery without paying royalties would serve as a positive subsidy to help them against their slaver rivals. There were other considerations too, of course. Not least, the sheer variety of legal subsystems across Britain's haphazard empire made it hard to envisage them coordinating in any one patents regime. And the effort of creating such a scheme seemed scarcely worthwhile, because many colonies were deemed incapable of inventing on any sustained level in any case (Whitehall did obtain reports on this from all the colonies). But it was the West Indian refiners' interest that was decisive. It effectively persuaded Parliament to leave the colonies outside the new patent regime.

As a result, the patent system that came into existence in 1852 incorporated for the first time an avowed spatial distinction when it came to the empire. It embraced a fissure between the home country and the colonies that was quite unlike what had existed in the previous century. The combination meant that the new, modernized patents system led to a radical debate that embraced international trade and politics, and in the end the constitution of imperialism.

THE ABOLITION CAMPAIGN

The 1852 law provoked a furious reaction from Britain's own sugar refiners. In particular, it provoked that reaction from one among them: a Glaswegian sugar magnate and president of the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, Robert A. MacFie. MacFie was already a known skeptic about patenting. He had given evidence against the practice prior to the passage of the new law,