From professional baseball to legal services, discrimination against sellers became widespread in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This article examines the means by which African American inventor-entrepreneurs overcame discrimination against them by consumers. It makes use of data from the advertising records of Garrett Morgan, who invented the modern gas mask and the traffic light. Both the deliberate use of measures, such as disguises and surrogates, and serendipity (the result of the racial neutrality of patents) were critical in facilitating sellers' anonymity and in promoting desirable economic outcomes.

Once described as “neglected,” brands and brand history have benefited from a recent surge of work in business history, economics, and management studies. This research, however, remains relatively tightly focused. Most attention is given to successful, long-lived brands and to the entrepreneurs who developed them. As in the market, so in research, the attraction of successful brands is understandable. Nevertheless, such a focus only reinforces both the well-known tendency to read history through the eyes of the winners and the assumption that losers and also-rans have nothing to tell us. The authors of the articles in this special section share both the wish to look beyond such assumptions and the belief that one way to do so is by complementing the study of brands with the study of trademarks and of the related legal, economic, and business arrangements that stand behind brands and provide context for their development since the nineteenth century.

Trademarks have traditionally been viewed as assets that, although intangible, nevertheless contribute to the success of firms. This study, based on a compilation of national trademark data, corrects existing distortions of the historical role of brands and their—often unsuccessful—use as business tools by countries, sectors, or firms. Legislation on, and the profuse use of, trademarks in the Western world was pioneered by Spain, rather than by France, the United States, or the United Kingdom, and was initiated in unusual sectors, such as papermaking and textiles, rather than in the more usual ones of food and beverages. Analysis of the applicants of Catalan trademarks, across sectors, during almost a century, reveals that the legal possession of a brand cannot in itself guarantee a firm's success.

This reassessment of the importance of trademarks in business during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that the focus by business historians on the beverage and processed-foodstuff industries has resulted in comparative neglect of the textile and metal-fabrication industries. The trademark histories of the latter two show that they followed their own paths, which resulted in their adopting three solutions to trademark issues that differed sharply from the approaches taken by the former two. The textile and metalfabrication sectors participated heavily in the evolution of an international regime to protect intellectual property; featured prominently in the development of patents in trademarks and trade names; and devised unique institutional solutions to the emerging problem of conflicting private marks in the Lancashire cotton-textile and Sheffield edge-tool industries. The history of these two industries indicates that trademark protection was not sufficient to ensure international competitiveness and long-run survival.

In expanding on earlier analyses of the evolution of multinational business that have drawn from concepts of competition and innovation, this study examines the strategies used by British multinationals, between 1870 and 1929, to protect the global reputation of their brands, which were crucial to their survival and success. Even after the passage of new trademark legislation in 1876, enforcement of trademarks remained expensive, and often firms preferred to negotiate, rather than to prosecute violations. Many trademark imitators were based in the newly industrializing countries of the time—the United States, Germany, and Japan—and were part of the British export supply chains as licensees, franchisees, or wholesalers. British firms responded to infringements by lobbying governments, appointing local agents to provide intelligence, and collaborating with other firms.

The introduction of collective and certification marks to U.S. law in 1946 by the Lanham Act has generally been regarded as an innovative and forward-looking step. Yet these marks had been widely used by individual states since the previous century, and international conventions had long been pushing the federal government to enact measures to protect them. Indeed, it may be stranger that the U.S. trademark law of 1905 did not include protection for such marks than that, forty years later, the Lanham Act did. In exploring why the law of 1905 failed to respond to widespread innovation, and why the Lanham Act was celebrated for fulfilling such a long-overdue obligation, this article raises questions about conventionally linear accounts of the development of trademark law and practice.