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."

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This paper aims at offering a reconstruction of the salient features of the most important formal institution introduced by European states in the Early Modern Period with the aim of recognizing and protecting the intellectual property of the inventors. Such institutions went under different names -

Fashion was arguably a social phenomenon that emerged in Europe during early modern times, and this paper seeks to determine whether it was unknown in the refined civilizations of the East. The conclusion is that fashion was not a European invention. The analysis of the evolution of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese clothing systems underlines how these societies underwent phases in which, thanks to propitious economic conditions, the accentuated propensity towards consumption stimulated behaviour that challenged the traditional hierarchies of appearance, usually regulated by canons of a prescriptive nature. Fashion was not, therefore, a European invention, but it only fully developed as a social institution in Europe, while in India, China, and Japan it only evolved partially, without being able to obtain full social recognition.

Au début de la période moderne, l'Italie du centre et du nord était fortement urbanisée et elle se caractérisait par la dominance d'un système corporatif urbain puissant et profondément enraciné. Il faisait obstacle à toute expansion de manufactures purement rurales; des activités industrielles rurales apparaissent cependant dans les territoires où, grâce à une structure institutionnelle particuliére, la campagne n'est pas directement soumise à une ville ou encore au moment où les corporations urbaines commencent à perdre de leur pouvoir. Certaines de ces manufactures rurales, surtout celle de la soie, deviennent extrêmement importantes dans les étapes préliminaires au processus d'industrialisation. Mais les régions de l'ltalie du centre et du nord, où naissent ces formes de proto-industrie rurale, ne semblent avoir connu ni croissance de la population, ni cette dégradation sociale que postulait l'une et l'autre Franklin Mendels dans sa ‘theorie de la protoindustrialisation’.