Ricerc@Sapienza

The research aims at providing new insights into the Italian economic performance and industrialization by exploiting trademarks as historical sources. During the century following the Italian political unification (1861) almost 165,700 trademarks were registered in Italy by domestic and foreign industrial firms. The applications are conserved in the Central State Archive (Archivio Centrale dello Stato) in Rome, which has been digitized the trademarks registered between 1869 – the year after the law regulating the industrialists’ right to mark products came into force in Italy – and 1965, the last year covered by digitization. Research carried out abroad has shown that trademarks provide a great deal of information of interest to business and economic historians. This research will offer new insights into the Italian economic performance and industrialization by exploiting, through an interdisciplinary approach, the trademarks registered in Italy as historical source, thus filling a gap in academic literature. To deepen the knowledge of the evolution of trademarks, economic, social and business historians will collaborate with scholars from marketing and sociology of communication and consumption fields. The marketing perspective and the analysis of trademarks from the point of view of the sociology of communication and consumption will enhance the understanding of how trademarks’ value changed to consumers’ perception over time, with the ambition to intercept the interest of a non-specialists audience as well. As for the expected impact, the research project will contribute to fill the gap between the research on trademarks in Italy, which is still in its infancy, and the studies on trademarks registered in foreign countries, which are instead at a more advanced stage. Furthermore, the research project is expected to give an original contribution to the debate on the impact of intellectual property rights on the economic development, a topic that scholars have investigated by focusing almost exclusively on patents. Among with articles in peer-reviewed journals, with special attention to open access resources, the research will produce an online database containing the information collected in each single trademark registration file. The new database will be designed in collaboration with all the members of the research project. This will be a preliminary step for realizing a Digital Public History product accessible from the website of the project, which will account in real time of the evolution of the activities. This product will have a dissemination value, but it will also be useful for educational purposes, spreading the output of the research far beyond the specialistic boundaries.