Marks and the Medici: Branding and Trademarks in Renaissance Global Business

Project Information

MARKS-MEDICI

Grant agreement ID: 793583

DOI

10.3030/793583

Project closed

EC signature date 20 April 2018

Start date 7 January 2019

End date 6 January 2021

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 183 454,80

EU contribution

€ 183 454,80

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY OF YORK
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MARKS-MEDICI (Marks and the Medici: Branding and Trademarks in Renaissance Global Business)

Reporting period: 2019-01-07 to 2021-01-06

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Although literal brands (marks burned onto livestock), seals, and symbols have marked objects of trade for millennia, the instantly-recognizable brands that dominate our modern lives and fill private and public spaces—from Apple and Coca-Cola to Mercedes-Benz and Samsung—are clearly different. They are intangible assets of enormous value, and metonyms for the companies themselves. They convey reputation, differentiate products, and attract consumer loyalty. They are drivers of modern capitalism. The story of these kinds of brands usually begins in the nineteenth century, in the period of mass-production and mass-marketing that followed the Industrial Revolution, when the international registration and protection of brands became a pressing issue for nation states. The Action “Marks and the Medici: Branding and Trademarks in Renaissance Global Business” (hereafter MARKS-MEDICI) is telling a very different origin story for the brand.

Merchants and tradesmen in medieval and Renaissance Italy inhabited a world—like ours—dominated by visual signs: from the arms of elite families to those of governments, magistracies, and institutions; from the simple marks of stone masons and the stamps of metal smiths to the elaborate marks of notaries. MARKS-MEDICI focused on a particular kind of mark: the mark, commonly called a signum in Latin and a segno in the Tuscan vernacular, used by medieval and Renaissance companies and firms to mark their account books, their business correspondence, and their merchandise. The very origins of modern brands and trademarks may, we argue, be found in these marks, in the way merchants and their customers used and imbued them with value, and in the way they were interpreted by jurists and merchant courts and protected by governments.

The marks of companies and firms were not, in these parallel traditions of business practice and legal doctrine, simply a means of communicating information about manufactured goods. They were multifaceted signifiers of a firm’s reputation, explicitly capable of providing a competitive advantage in domestic and foreign markets. They were immaterial things of real value, serving public and private functions, in need of state protection.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

MARKS-MEDICI presented an ambitious set of scientific and training objectives. It was on-track to far exceeding these objectives when, 6/10ths of the way through the tenure of the project, COVID 19 made international travel and research impossible. Notwithstanding the delays, cancellations, and postponements of an international pandemic, MARKS-MEDICI was able to achieve most of its goals.

The training goals of MARKS-MEDICI included: an exchange of knowledge and methods between the researcher and the supervisor, Teresa da Silva Lopes of the University of York, through weekly supervisions and routine collaboration; the researcher collaborating with international research networks; the researcher making important career and collaboration connections in the UK and continental Europe. All of these goals were accomplished.
Researcher Fredona undertook extensive archival research in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Belgium. He organized two international conferences (one was postponed due to COVID 19), organized and chaired four conference panels, and presented four papers at international conferences (in the UK, Canada, USA, and the Netherlands). Fredona has co-published articles or co-presented research with business historians from four countries (UK, USA, Norway, and Portugal). Fredona has also built important ties with business historians in the Netherlands, Italy, and Japan. He has also taught “International Business Strategy” at the York Management School.

Due to COVID-19, the scientific goals of MARKS-MEDICI were not entirely met. Nonetheless, the outputs produced so far exceed in quantitative terms those originally promised, and have appeared or will appear in top-tier peer reviewed journals. As part of MARKS-MEDICI, the researcher Robert Fredona has published three peer-reviewed articles and has a fourth presently under review, has published four other articles, has another book chapter currently submitted, has guest-edited an issue of the premier business history journal in the world, and is in the process of completing another major journal article with the project sponsor Teresa da Silva Lopes of the University of York.

The publisher and editors of Italy and the Origins of Capitalism, theme issue of Business History Review 94 (Spring 2020), did not permit the inclusion of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie funding statement in this journal, including the two articles we authored. It was agreed that Researcher Fredona would be explicitly named as co-organizer of the related events in the journal and that his Marie Skłodowska-Curie affiliation would be included twice. We made all best efforts to have the statement included, but it proved impossible. The fact that we included it in other publications, including future ones (after the end of the project period), is a sign of our conscientious attempt to follow the grant protocols.

The encyclopedia article in Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy did not allow any acknowledgments whatsoever, as is common with encyclopedia entries.

All other articles include the funding statement. As stated in our report, all future publication will include the funding statement. We confirm this.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The outputs of MARKS-MEDICI have met the highest possible standard. MARKS-MEDICI has already made essential interventions in debates about the origins of capitalism, about the role of the state in premodern commerce, and about the earliest brands and their creation in the earliest truly globalized long-distance trade (between Italy and the Levant in the Sixteenth century). It has identified the earliest theories of the brand, and the oldest known sale of intellectual property (in 14th-century Italy). Most importantly, MARKS-MEDICI will spearhead a rethinking of the origins of intellectual property and of brands and trademarks as an asset affecting competitiveness in trade. The researcher Fredona is now part of continuing, international discussions of these matters.

Fourteenth-century register of the marks of metal smiths (State Archive, Florence)

Researcher Fredona in Rome

XVI-century commercial correspondence of Italian agents in Belgium with trademarks (Antwerp)

Trade mark of the firm called Francesco di Giuliano de’ Medici & co., on a ledger-Harvard University