By freeing Europe's regional and international trade from tariffs and other trade barriers, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) has often been hailed as a key factor in promoting the post-war economic recovery in Western Europe and in preventing a return to the disaster of the...

This paper provides a reinterpretation of seventeenth-century mercantilist trade doctrine and policy in light of recent theories of strategic trade policy. Mercantilist economic thought, like strategic export-promotion theories, emphasized the use of government policy to capture rents that arise...