As Dev Gangjee, the author of this excellent book, makes clear, the economic and hence political significance of geographical indications (GIs) is of growing importance. If a crucial forebear to today's GI protection lies in the travails of the French wine trade in the early twentieth century, developing countries today have come to view the protection of GIs as an important means of protecting the skills involved in the creation of their own indigenous products, whether they be food and drink or indeed handicrafts. The contemporary significance of GIs is evidenced most directly by their inclusion in the TRIPs agreement, which sets out a framework for their international protection. This book is an authoritative description of the current international legal regime for the protection of GIs. Its authority derives in large measure from the fact that, as Gangjee argues, the shape of the current regime, its strengths and weaknesses, can be understood only within its historical context. And this book also presents a lucid exposition of that history.

The clearest evidence for suggesting that only an historical account will satisfy any understanding of GIs is, as Gangjee shows, the epistemological confusion underlying the term itself. Such confusion is reflected in the variety of national regimes (of which there are apparently at least 43) designed to protect geographical indications of source and indeed in the extraordinary diverse terminology, what Gangjee terms, ‘an alphabet soup’, which overlaps with the meaning of GI or is closely related to it. These include: the Indication of Source (IS), the Appellations of Origin (AO), the Appellation d'Origine Contrôllée (AOC), the Protected Designation of Origin, the Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), and the GI itself. Nonetheless, this diverse terminology broadly conceals three more or less distinct approaches to the protection of geographical indications of source, whose historical roots are considered in the first section of the book. First, their protection may be situated within the terms of an intellectual property discourse. In this context, the geographical indication of source would be viewed primarily as a badge of origin which should be protected against public confusion or as embodying a reputation. Second, there is the unfair competition approach which also emphasizes protection against public confusion. And third, and perhaps most importantly, there is the approach embodied in the appellations of origin, which emphasises the perceived connection between ‘product, place and people’, and protects the ‘generic use’ use of the sign, where public confusion is not necessarily involved.

Thus, the first part of the book begins by asking why signs indicating geographical origin were originally seen as suitable for IP protection. It does so first of all by considering how the IS was dealt with during negotiations first for the Paris Convention and then the Madrid Agreement, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Regarding the former, perhaps the most significant outcome was a failure to agree on a separate protection regime for a geographical collective sign and instead the recognition of a collective mark of origin whose closest relative would be the registered trade mark. As for the Madrid Agreement, Gangjee argues that it signifies the transition from viewing geographical indications of origin as based on reputation and customer confusion towards a recognition that certain signs will embody a particular link between a product and its place of origin, whose protection should not depend upon customer confusion; a link which is described by the word ‘terroir’ and which is embodied in the terms, AO and AOC. In two of the most interesting chapters of the book, Gangjee shows how these terms and the notion of ‘terroir’ emerged from the experience of the wine-growing industry in France over the course of the twentieth century and were subsequently embodied in the Lisbon Agreement of 1958.

Thus, chapter 3 shows how the response of the French to the need to protect the native wine industry from natural catastrophe and its aftermath was to recognize and seek to protect wines whose production embodied particular production skills rooted in a specific local environment. But Gangjee also points out that this act of recognition was itself shaped by ideologies which inflected political discourse at the time, for example the notion of republican nation building, and formed the basis for the early laws protecting the wine industry in 1905 and 1919. These laws prefigured later French legislation in 1935 and 1947 which set out to guarantee both the origin and quality not just of wines but of other products as well: the 1935 Act bringing into being the AOC. A final section of chapter 3 contrasts developments in France with Germany and the UK where protection of geographical indications of source depended upon unfair competition law: the former focusing on protecting the product and its production and the later on protecting the sign which signified the product. This section is comparatively brief, perhaps too brief, and inevitably does not consider, at least in the case of the UK, the equally important political assumptions regarding international trade which can be discerned in the development of passing off. Finally, the first section concludes with a consideration of the Lisbon Agreement of 1958, which Gangjee argues represented ‘the high water mark of the international protections of IGOs’ (p. 127), in that it not only helped to define the very category of subject matter which it sought to protect but also extended that protection beyond anything intellectual property or unfair competition law were likely to offer. Thus, a striking aspect of the Agreement was that it offered absolute protection to certain generic signs, beyond any concern with ‘misrepresentation, dilution or misappropriation’.

The second section of the book is framed around the TRIPs agreement and its protection of GIs. It shows both how the relevant terms in the TRIPs agreement and their shortcomings reflect the conceptual confusion which had dogged the GI and its close relations throughout their history, and it also seeks to identify some normative principles which might underpin a future international regime for protecting GIs. Gangjee shows that the relevant provisions of TRIPs result from a series of compromises with widely differing national regimes and indeed input from both WIPO and the EU. Thus, although a number of national regimes include a system of registration, that is not an aspect of TRIPs. Nor is it clear whether TRIPs understands GIs as private rights, in the manner of for example intellectual property rights, or as collectively generated property. As for the specific provisions, Art. 22 of TRIPs reflects the notion of a GI as a sign which communicates a place of origin and its connection to specific products, and finds it roots most obviously in trade mark and unfair competition laws, which defend against public deception. Whereas, Art. 23 offers absolute protection to some GIs in the manner of the AOC. Once again, Gangjee offers an excellent account of the various negotiations, reflecting the particular interests of the parties concerned, which led to this outcome and its obvious anomalies, of which the most obvious is the question of why Art. 23 should refer specifically to wine and spirits.

Gangjee suggests that while TRIPs has been lauded as a major breakthrough in the international protection of GIs, its obvious shortcomings at best make it a basis for a more fully realized regime in the future. Which of course raises the question as to whether such a regime has a normative justification. Gangjee thus ends the book by asking whether the protection of GIs can be justified and on what basis, since the answers to these questions would determine the shape and the extent of the protection they would command. Although he does not roundly endorse any particular justification, it is clear that Gangjee believes there is a future for GIs, which differentiates them from, for example, trade mark protection. In one particularly interesting passage, he suggests that GIs might have a role in protecting traditional knowledge, something which has been a particular concern of developing countries. He suggests too that GI protection which is based on the actual geographical sign, rather than on protecting the knowledge involved in the production of the goods, would allow local production methods to evolve over time. Finally, he argues that ultimately there will be a need for a registration regime which will inevitably set out the parameters of international GI protection.

In his conclusion, Gangjee notes that any workable registration regime would need to answer a number of questions, including among others; to what extent is change accommodated?, would new technological developments transform a product's artisanal character?, what are the geographic boundaries of production? He suggests that the answers to these questions may need to be the subject of further research. It would be interesting to know Gangjee's own views. One argument may be that they can have no single answer. One of the great strengths of this book and indeed much of its originality resides in the extent to which Gangjee deconstructs the very notion of the GI and related concepts. He shows that their perceived existence, indeed their very meaning, may change depending upon the specific historical context in which they are deployed. That context is itself shaped first and foremost by prevailing ideologies and by the specific material interests of the various players involved in their negotiation. It is possible to imagine that there may be circumstances in which the signatories of TRIPs agree on a registration regime, but it will presumably reflect not any objective answer to these questions which may be located through research, but rather the particular political balance at the time. Nonetheless, the fact that these questions arise and that their answers seem important and timely is a testament to the great strengths of this monograph.