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as absolute "rights." The abolitionist case reflected laissez-faire strictures against "monopolies" of all kinds; the absolutist embraced convictions about the intrinsic justice of rewarding labor, originality, and creative genius-and insisted on a sometimes utilitarian imperative to support creators for the sake of the common good. Between the two extremes stood many plans for mitigated property regimes. Some proposed compulsory license schemes, for example, which would permit others to make and distribute a creation, but compel them to pay a predetermined royalty when they did so. Others suggested some kind of state-appointed panel of experts to reward inventors for their creations. Every side laid claim to support from the nature of science, but represented that nature differently. Was the scientist a positivist revealer of God-given facts, a heroic discoverer possessed of unique genius, or an everyman laboring for meager rewards? Or was science properly a collective practice in any case? And were discovery and invention heroic acts, or human ones indebted to common knowledge? The clash over such questions led straight to the most contested political conceptions of the age, including free trade, colonialism, and political order.

Meanwhile, "intellectual property" became spatial, but in a different way. At root, MacFie had campaigned not so much for the abolition of copyrights and patents, but for what he called "assimilation." The idea was to harmonize such levies internationally, ideally at zero, but, if zero could not be attained, at some shared level. And so this foe of all intellectual property ended up becoming a respected contributor to the international movement for extending such protections across borders. Freeing them from national specificities, this movement helped solidify the very notion that both patents and copyrights were aspects of a single entity "intellectual property"-that transcended pragmatic and local jurisdictions. So far from being abolished, in other words, the succeeding years saw patenting embedded in international law and practice-a process that attained its authoritative expression in the Paris and Berne conventions. These remain the bases of international patent and copyright law respectively to this day. In the same way, major international meetings in the same generation promoted scientific universalism, medical procedures, and trade policies.

In the end the two countries that abolitionists had pointed to as thriv- ingwithout patents gave up and fell into line. Switzerland adopted its own patent law in 1888, and modernized it in the early twentieth century. The Netherlands, which had abolished patenting in the free trade moment, created its own new patent law too. For both countries, it was not a lack of invention or innovation without patenting that forced the change. In fact the evidence was ambiguous on that score. Rather, both feared being excluded from the international club now being formed around the Berne and Paris conventions. They passed patent laws to head off that possibil- ityTheir concession marked an epoch: the ascent of intellectual property as a species of international politics.64

In summer 1871, as the inquiries into patents reached their climax, a nearblind traveler from NewYork stepped quietly from the train at Euston. It was cold and rainy, andwith London full of French refugees from the siege of the Communards lodging was hard to come by. He eventually found a bed in a tiny bedsit in Queen's Road. The stranger slept all of three hours before forcing himself up again and venturing forth. He immediately launched himself into an extraordinary tour of scientific luminaries. First, he went to Herbert Spencer's lodgings; they played a hurried game of billiards, then set out for the Royal Institution and JohnTyndall. Thomas Henry Huxley came next. From Bain to Lubbock to Galton, the visitor went lame from the distance he walked.

What merited these laborswas the chance to realize agreat nineteenthcentury dream: that of making the ideal of international scientific