5 - Mexico and the Puzzle of Partial Harmonization

Summary

Across the globe, modern patent laws and their early modern antecedents have served as policy instruments to reward and promote innovation. Best known are the first modern patent regimes in England, France, and the United States along with those systems adopted in the next wave of industrializing nations in Europe. Less examined are those patent systems and patenting cultures in late-developing countries, ranging from Eastern Europe to Latin America and beyond. This chapter examines one of these cases: the emergence of a modern patent system in Mexico between 1890 and 1910. There, new patent institutions drew partly on forms inherited from its colonial Spanish past, but were also shaped by the exigencies of responding to the international economy of the late-century Atlantic world. A partial outlier among other late industrializers, Mexico moved to harmonize its patent system with that of the United States in order to take full advantage of cross-border technology flows.