Why did multinationals patent in Spain?: Several historical inquiries

To fully understand the processes of technology transfer in the twentieth century, we would probably have to begin by scrutinizing them throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, especially if we would like to consider the topic from a global business history perspective. Multinational corporations initiated expansion efforts, which implied shifts of technology and human capital from one nation to another, from at least 1870 onward, just when the political and entrepreneurial interests related to patent protection also started to become global issues. The international meetings and agreements in the 1870s and 1880s that led to the International Union for the Protection of Industrial Property, the ancestor of the current World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), demonstrated the increasing concern and influence of corporations and networks of agents employed by the former in the ongoing process of securing transnational rights to safeguard new technologies. 1 Recent research on the role of patent and trademark agents in lobbying both national laws and international treaties corroborates the idea that in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, the companies that used their legal services urgently needed protection for pressing new business: that of technological globalization