"Brands, Trademarks, and the Law in Medieval and Renaissance Business"

The marks of artisans, manufacturers, and merchants are likely as old as organized commerce in the West, but the history of the trademark and its role in branding usually begins in the nineteenth century, when marks were registered in France, Britain, and the United States and when “modern” trademark law emerged. Yet trademarks already played an important role in the often dangerous and highly uncertain global commerce of the medieval Mediterranean. The marks of contemporary Italian merchants were protected, by governments and guilds, and even understood by lawyers as a species of intangible property. They were sold, negotiated about in partnership agreements, and, as an indication of quality and trust, played key roles in reputation building (and “brand” building), in the differentiation and the competitiveness of firms, and possibly innovation. The business- and legal-historical study of trademarks has hitherto chiefly focused on a set of discrete contexts: the mid-nineteenth century and later, (relatively) liberal political, economic, and legal regimes, especially the Anglo-American common law; large firms relying on economies of scale for competitive advantage, disparate distribution chains. This paper, instead, focuses on marks in the radically different contexts of the premodern Mediterranean: the mid-14th to mid-sixteenth centuries, small-scale family firms, inside proto-mercantilist regimes with powerful craft and merchant guilds, in an entirely different legal tradition. But were marks in the premodern mediterranean already understood as “intellectual property” and was there, indeed, already a theory of the brand ? This paper will begin to answer these questions by examining the writings of medieval and Renaissance merchants and jurists.