Guilds, Patents, and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge: Northern Italy during the Early Modern Age

The technological history of early modern Europe was marked by "the spread of technical knowledge through the movement of people" and "the creation by almost all the European states of laws and regulations intended to reward and safeguard invention," writes Carlo Marco Belfanti in "Guilds, Patents and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge." The mobility of the skilled workforce in this era was "regulated by the actions of two institutions dedicated to opposing objectives (or at least appearing to be so): the urban craft guilds and the patent laws." Rich historical literatures on the patent system and on guilds exist mainly in isolation from each other, but Belfanti draws on both to argue "that patents and guilds were not always in conflict but rather were two aspects of the same institutional setup." Their interaction was a crucial feature of the institutional context for technological diffusion that prevailed until the eighteenth century, "when the objective of the competition between manufacturing centers changed from acquiring secrets related to the production process to adopting product innovations in response to market demand."