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Historians once more begin to stress the importance of the law in facilitating or obstructing economic growth.' As far as the patent law is concerned, there has been no lack of comment by historians of technology and of industrialization about its effects. Indeed, there is hardly one who has not felt it incumbent to express some opinion about the matter, and yet there has been little solid investigation of the patent law in the second half of the 18th century by anyone except members of the Patent Office staff themselves.2 Even Sir William Holdsworth's mammoth History of English Law helps us very little. The section on 18th-century patent law is very short, highly derivative from papers published early in the Law Quarterly Review, and often confusing;3 yet it manages to reach the firm conclusion