Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [168]
IMPERIAL PROPERTY
"We read of `intellectual property"' MacFie sniffed in the last of his antipatenting and anticopyright books in 1883. "Whatever else is comprehended under this name, it extends to invention. "54 But it already extended much further than that, as he well knew. It united invention with literary and artistic creativity, and, indeed, with industrial and corporate symbols in the form of trademarks, by providing an underpinning concept. One could now say that invention and authorship were tied together as aspects of intellectual property. That was the point of the concept. And by subsuming these previously disparate areas of law under the same conceptual identity, it paved the way for the multiplication of protections that the twentieth centurywould create.
Yet MacFie ended this last volume by drawing attention to a different way in which "intellectual property" extended previous conventions. It not only made them conceptually deeper andwider, but also underpinned their extension across geographical space. In the i88os, just as the antipatenting campaign faltered in Britain, two great international conferences took place, at Paris and Berne, that would set in train the international harmonization of"intellectual property" that has proceeded ever since. It was therefore both fitting and challenging that MacFie's book ended by posing the problem of the relation between this new kind ofproperty and global politics. But it did so in a political context distinct from those of Paris and Berne, albeit one more closely related than we tend now to remember. MacFie's grandiose peroration was imperial, not European. It called for a radical reconstruction of the entire British Empire.
We tend to forget this now, but in the high Victorian era, before the race for Africa really got going, it was not self-evident to Britons themselves that the empire was worth preserving. Doctrinaire advocates of Manchester school political economy were not particularly inclined to see any rationale for colonies. In a free trade world, Britain, as the globe's greatest manufacturer, would continue to export goods whether or not colonies remained under its control. People would continue to want the cheapest products, and those came from the United Kingdom's factories. At the same time, colonies drained British resources because they had to be defended against attacks by rival powers. This made for a hugely demanding worldwide burden on the Royal Navy, at a time when it was spending heavily on rearmament (with Armstrong guns, very often). Furthermore, it was not clear why the colonists should want a continued imperial connection, since it made them tempting targets. Around mid-century, therefore, Whitehall made a number of moves to reduce the British military commitment to the colonies and to require colonial administrations to fund their own defense. And highlyplaced London politicians made statements that the ties between colony and metropole were entirely voluntary. Any colony that desired to leave the empire could do so on amicable terms. The combination seemed to imperialists to carry a clear message: that the empire was a fragile and friendless entity soon to dissolve.
The empire itself was apparently in peril. Proposals to shore it up began to appear in response. Those proposals soon coalesced around a concept first articulated in the Quarterly Review in 1853: that of "imperial federation." This was a proposal- the details of which varied widely- to reconfigure the empire as a single polity centered on an assembly or council to convene in London. This would be a new body altogether, sitting atop the British parliament, that would dealwith issues of imperial scope: war and peace, treaties, and common legal systems. The idea made little