Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting history of the role of Scotland in the story of how rhubarb seeds were smuggled back from Russia in the 18th century: http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/sites/default/files/jrcpe_47_1_lee.pdf (PDF, 5Mb)

A particularly choice quote:

"From 1750 to 1850 Russia was making a fortune from trading rhubarb root through St Petersburg to Europe via the Baltic. Russia supplied and controlled the export of the dried root, thus controlling its price. It banned the export of the seeds to block the growing of the plant elsewhere. Catherine the Great took considerable interest in the cultivation and sale of rhubarb, as it helped to finance her military campaigns in Finland, Poland, Ukraine and Crimea. The price of rhubarb root rocketed! At one time the seeds were more valuable, weight for weight, than gold. To give some idea of the veneration that was given to the plant, Lord Stanhope, a Catholic peer, sent some rhubarb seeds to the Pope in a gold case, encouraging him to grow the plant in the gardens at the Vatican. This monopoly could not last indefinitely. Professor John Hope stated in 1770 that if 'Russian' rhubarb could be grown successfully in the UK, it would save the economy about £1 million a year (approximately £20–30 million in today's money)"

This just goes to show the west has blatant cultural disregard for intellectual property - this was daring IP theft, calculated to displace the innovative Russian rhubarb industry and costing it millions of pounds /s

(The original copyright holder could not be reached for comment, despite significant prayer.)

Litigious food makes my stomach turn.

There's plenty of incentives in the market to innovate in the GMO space without legal protections, as there have been for thousands of years. Absent those protections, GMO development would probably see more cooperation innovation without hurting the speed of innovation.

Regional protections for product labeling make a lot more sense (vidalia onions...) and improve competition while still benefiting large growers.

This is nothing compared to how we stole tea from China. For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History was a good read about that.

And rubber.

_The Thief at the end of the World_, the story of "bio-pirate" Henry Wickham, who smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil in the 1870s, is a great read.[0]

[0]-https://www.amazon.com/Thief-End-World-Rubber-Empire/dp/0670...

See Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Fr...

"Free Trade" and strong "intellectual property" regimes are tools of economically dominant, not upstart, countries.

Related:

Chamber's Encyclopaedia, Editorial Statement, Revised Edition, 1874: Or a 19th Century Edit War

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4xe2k1/chamber...

("Free trade" plays a role.)

"would save the economy about £1 million a year (approximately £20–30 million in today's money)"

Making the (I'm guessing safe) assumption that the UK Rhubarb industry is worth more than that. I wonder if this is an indication of just how much the economy has grown that that now seems like such a small sum (the £20-£30 million figure). Or if it's an example of the value of something increasing despite it becoming 'free'. Rhubarb is effectively now in the public domain, and it seems crazy (to me at least) that someone would try to maintain a monopoly on the plant. Although half way through writing this I remembered Monsanto...

Over the course of 250 years I think applying a CPI conversion is far too simple to capture all of the qualitative changes in a political economy. That said, this list estimates 40x increase in the size of the UK economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_%2...

A billion pound savings isn't anything to sneeze at in a niche luxury good.

Agreed, it isn't clear to me what a 'good' conversion would be though. I suppose you could compare to an average wage or something, but then that doesn't capture subsistence farmers, or that there wasn't really a middle class then, or that on some measures a poor person today, is better off than a king from the 18th century.

On top of that, the nature of the thing we are measuring has changed. Today it's a fruit, 250 years ago it's seeds and root were medicinal.

All that said I'm struggling to work out where you got the billion £ figure from, or the 40x increase. The first 2 tables seem to suggest growth on the order of 100-150 fold, which would suggest £100 millions, rather than a billion, or am I misunderstanding something?

I was looking at 1820-2008 in Maddison which gives us the 40x increase. Both those numbers are in 1990 dollars, so using your estimate of 20 million after inflation 20/36,232 ~= 1000/1,446,959 ignoring all the confounding coffee stains on the back of the napkin.

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