Subhadeep Chowdhury’s thesis, Made in Imperialism: A Cultural History of the Law for Registering Trade Marks in British India 1877–1947, examines how the law of registering trade marks in British India was debated in India under British colonial rule. The broader question that the thesis tackles is how fixing the origin of certain goods and commodities via legal mechanisms such as registers presupposes a cultural change over time that often remains unexamined.
While Britain herself came up with a trade mark registration system in 1875-76, British India had her first ever law for registering trade marks in 1940. For almost sixty years, most commercial institutions that represented foreign business interests, including that of the Manchester textiles industry, remained strongly against the registration of trade marks in British India. By the 1930s, several factors including the gradual rise of indigenous manufacturing of cotton textiles in India as well as the growing power of anti-colonial Indian nationalism started to shift the opinion. The thesis highlights the cultural history of how elite Indian society internalised the concept of goods having a legally regulated origin under the political and economic tensions produced by British colonial rule.
Subhadeep Chowdhury successfully defended his thesis on 30 April 2026.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: An international history of trademark registration with an emphasis on former British colonies.
Evaluation committee
- Professor Lionel Bently, University of Cambridge (first opponent)
- Professor Ruth L. Okediji, Harvard Law School (second opponent)
- Professor Kim Priemel, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Marius Buning, University of Oslo
Supervisors
- Professor Véronique Pouillard, University of Oslo
- Research Professor Tereza Østbø Kuldova, OsloMet