From a long-term perspective, technological innovation could have come from local or domestic inventive and research activity, or from the transfer of foreign technology. In reality either option produces similar effects and often it was a combination of both which drove the historical...

In this paper we will explore how international corporations used the Spanish patent system in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in order to discover what the actual effects of its apparent weakness were. The origins and evolution of corporate patenting...

Using a new database of all patents issues in Mexico between 1870 and 1911, this paper explores the impact of the vast wave of technology imports into Mexico during the nineteenth century period of globalization. Historians have established that massive technology imports made possible sustained...

Introduction -- Technology and the emergence of atraso, 1820-1870 -- Technology and the imperative of progreso, 1870-1910 -- Sewing machines -- Beer and glass bottles -- Cyanide and silver -- Obstacles to adoption -- Constraints to learning -- Conclusions -- Appendix one : patent data --...

Challenging the standard view of the Porfirian state as dominated by personalist politics, foreign financial interests, and a disadvantageous export economy, this book argues that beginning in the 1890s, the Mexican government adopted a coherent set of economic policies explicitly designed to...

Using a new database of all patents issues in Mexico between 1870 and 1911, this paper explores the impact of the vast wave of technology imports into Mexico during the nineteenth century period of globalization. Historians have established that massive technology imports made possible sustained...

Successful technological change in countries outside the northern Atlantic during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on entrepreneurial skills, not inventive expertise. In this examination of the Owens automatic glass-bottle-blowing machine in Mexico between 1905 and 1912,...