Colonial Patents: Industrial Property Law and Nationality in Mandate Palestine

This Article offers the first historical analysis of patent law in British Mandate Palestine (1917-1948), examining 4,395 patent applications through a reconstructed registry and archival sources. It develops Colonial Patents as a framework for analysing legal transplantation in colonial contexts. The analysis reveals Britain’s hybrid imperial patent policy: rejecting empire-wide unification while creating preferential procedures for British patents. Palestine’s 1924 Patent Ordinance emerged from London-Jerusalem negotiations, including London’s rejected proposal to abolish local patents. The registry shows profound participation asymmetries: while foreign and local inventors each filed approximately half of the applications, Jewish inventors comprised nearly all local applicants, with scant Arab Palestinians filings. Archival sources confirm British engagement with Jewish patent agents but no Arab involvement. This disparity reflects patent law's ideological foundations in Enlightenment progress and industrial capitalism, which resonated with European-educated Jewish immigrants but remained peripheral to Arab Palestinian society, demonstrating how nominally neutral colonial institutions operated differentially.