Patents over military equipment: shifting uses for shifting modes of governance

ABSTRACT Patents for invention have a history that goes back centuries in England. As a result, they can be used to interrogate changes in the practices of governance that occurred over that time (and further back). Using the ideas of Michel Foucault, that described the conditions of possibility for ‘governmentality’, an analysis of patents over military equipment allows a reconception of Foucault’s modes of governance. Military patents facilitate the goals of research, given the centrality of the monopolies of the use of force in the modern state. The revised model presented here indicates that over the millennium governance shifted from feudal, to the governmentalist, via a period that was neither fully feudal, nor fully governmental.