Our book has sought to surface the historical varieties of national patent cultures at the moment when the boundaries between global and sovereign patent systems remain uncertain. Patent diversity has been remarkably resilient in the face of harmonization. In the age of empires, colonial patent cultures on the periphery diverged from those of the metropole. In the postcolonial period, newly independent nations envisioned patents as a strategic means to achieve economic traction by promising security to foreign investors, as a form of inventors’ property to satisfy the demands of mechanic politic circles or, quite simply, as a signaling of progress. There is now ever more complexity being added to an already bewildering amount of variation in the intellectual property protection of scientific and technical innovation. It threatens to erase the very territorial boundaries upon which both national patent diversity and harmonization are grounded. Future research needs to address such questions as what does pervasive patent diversity entail in the long term for the prospects of harmonization? Will international governance mechanisms develop that can accommodate variation in patent norms? And how willing might domestic patent systems be to experiment within their own patent cultures? This volume presents a portrait of creative, often innovative variants in how invention can be encouraged through patent. The upshot is that the master historical narrative of patent law appears to be not so much harmonization as resilient heterogeneity.

Expectations of the global harmonization of patent law are commonplace in legal literature. Historical writing on national patent systems, however, reveal their persistent specificities to national economic and cultural needs. These two narratives are not easy to reconcile, and the cessation in 2010 of the World Intellectual Property Office’s efforts to reconcile patent laws suggests that the diversity is the prevalent phenomenon. The reasons for this include the diverse rationales of patents in terms of: the “natural” rights of inventors; the social rewards for useful inventions; investments in the risky future of industrial progress; and the incentives required to encourage inventors to share private knowledge. Compounding this complexity is the way that historically libertarian cultures have privileged the rights of the inventor, whereas cultures cherishing strong government have focused on the needs of the state. While some systems have focused on the importance of novelty, others have focused on the utility of an invention – and not all national Patent Offices are formally required to examine patent applications for such qualities. The resilient diversity of patent systems can thus be understood as part of a multiplicity of contingent “social contracts” of protecting invention that are subject to local more than global forces.