Calendrier du 09 mai 2018
Economic History Seminar
Du 09/05/2018 de 12:30 à 14:00
Salle R2-20, Campus Jourdan, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris
PALA Giovanni (Oxford)
Innovation encouragement in pre-unification Italy: the case of patents and industrial fairs, 1815-1860
The importance of patents of invention in influencing the direction of innovation and economic choices is increasingly supported in the literature, both theoretically and empirically. Their role as an instrument to deepen our understanding of specific industrial or macroeconomic dynamics is similarly well-established. The use of this tool applied to the nineteenth century European peripheral economies has been limited though, and in the Italian case discontinuous in either time or geographic scope. In fact, there are major geographic areas that are completely unexplored for the years of the Risorgimento (1815-1861). My research fills this gap and provides a new dataset that for the first time compares patent trends in the three kingdoms of Lombardy-Venetia, Sardinia and the Two Sicilies. Additionally, it proposes a study of the legislation and institutional debate in the Italian states using new archival sources. Three results emerge from the study. Firstly, evidence of an increasing confidence and final expansion in the use of patents to protect the traditional Risorgimento’s sectors of innovation. Secondly, that this expansion was fueled in a conspicuous way by foreign capital and foreign innovations, chiefly of French origin. Thirdly, that this was in part understood and tolerated by the administration and establishment of the time as part of a set of policies for the encouragement of inventiveness and growth in the peninsula, which included industrial fairs. These results confirm some of the received wisdom on the period and reassess the Italian dependency from and openness to foreign countries by placing its incipit firmly in the first half of the century. The results are particularly relevant for the debate on the nature and benefits of patenting, their use as tools for the acquisition of other countries’ knowledge, and the creation of incentives for foreign investments inflows. Further study of French investments in peripheral economies is warranted.