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By Root 2094 0

based on representation, information, trade, and blood. A particularly interesting literary manifestation came from the historianJ. A. Froude. Froude wholeheartedly shared the movement's rather Carlylean denunciation of the moral and physical effects of domestic industrialization. Rather than seeing large numbers of Britons escape those effects by emigrating to America, however, he wanted to see them given subsidies to move to the colonies.61 In 1884-85 he undertook a voyage to Australia and New Zealand, returning through the United States. He published his observations as a book pointedly entitled Oceana. The title came from James Harrington's work of the 165os, which had envisaged a fantasyversion of England becoming an eternal "commonwealth for increase." Froude's point was that, properly organized, Victorian Britain could create Oceana in Oceania. `Anglo-Saxons" carrying "the genius of English freedom" would, he thought, bring this about by unifying these places into a single commonwealth united by an "organic and vital" tie.62 In 1887 the first of a series of "Colonial Conferences" met in London to consider such federalist ideas, and the possibility of establishing uniformity in patents was raised. But "consciousness of national unity" was not enough to carry it, and the idea went nowhere. It continued to be raised in later conferences, but proved intractable. It was this kind of problem, as well as the more obvious issues of viability, that in the end doomed federalist imperialism. The League closed its doors in 1893.

MONKSWELL'S DEMON

In 1891, the jurist Robert Collier, Baron Monkswell, lamented the state of contemporary copyright law. It seemed, he told Parliament, as though ever since 1709 it had been "the sport of some malignant demon." The same point could have been made of patents in the Victorian period. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century patents had been in a far worse state than copyright. But what Monkswell's remark equally implied was the extent to which coherence and logical order themselves had come to be seen as virtues intrinsic to sound law. This had not always been the case in these fields, at least. But by now it was reasonable to assert that if there was such a thing as "intellectual property" - and there was - then its legal manifestations should be consistent. Patent and copyright law should be species of this larger body, as too should be design and trademark law. Instead a mischievous sprite had seemingly rejoiced in taking what should have been a logical structure and reducing it to a confused, inchoate, selfcontradictory mess.63 Monkswell's demon was thus the legal antithesis to James Clerk Maxwell's more famous demon of 1871: it produced disorder without any visible expenditure of energy. But in the cosmos of the new, self-consciously modern legal mind, it was equally paradoxical.

This was new. The concept of "intellectual property" was a creation of the decades immediately preceding Monkswell's remark. It took a generation or more to coalesce. Those battles forced defenders of patents to articulate hitherto discrete bodies of legal doctrine as aspects of one deeper concept. They largely succeeded, but the legacy of their success was a perception that, insofar as the branches of intellectual property law and administration were inconsistent, theywere also flawed. Consistency would from this point on be identified increasingly with two kinds of attribute. One was intrinsic: it had to do with the nature of invention, and with the identity of the author, inventor, or discoverer. The other was extensive: it asserted universality, across time and, more emphatically, space. The reason why the invention of intellectual property in the midto late nineteenth century matteredwas that it brought both into contact and insisted on reconciling them.

Asa result, the Victorian patent war mapped out for the first time what remains to this day our range of options relating to intellectual property. Those options extended all the way from the outright abolition ofpatents and copyrights to their confirmation