Historians have claimed that Canadian manufacturing grew in the nineteenth century largely because of the National Policy tariff. . In the case of the cotton textile sector, our findings cast serious doubt on the long-standing idea that the National Policy was indispensable to the growth of...

The Constitution of 1787 was designed to give Congress powers over trade policy that it lacked under the Articles of Confederation. The Washington administration was split over whether to use these powers to raise revenue or to retaliate against Britain's discriminatory trade policies. Obsessed...

An unresolved question concerning post-Civil War U.S. industrialization is the degree to which import tariffs protected domestic manufacturers from foreign competition. This paper considers the impact of import tariffs on the domestic pig iron industry, the basic building block of the entire...

Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection. We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the 1830s. American and British producers...

This paper calculates the Anderson-Neary (2005) trade restrictiveness index (TRI) for the United States using nearly a century of data. The results show that the standard import-weighted average tariff understates the TRI, defined as the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as the...

This paper calculates a trade restrictiveness index, i.e., the uniform tariff that yields the same welfare loss as an existing tariff structure, for nearly a century of US data. The results show that the average tariff understates the TRI by about 75 percent. The static deadweight loss from US...

A moment of consequence to the postbellum U.S. tariff debate was the 'conversion' of David Ames Wells, Commissioner of the Revenue from 1865- 1870, to free trade. When he began his work Wells was a disciple of the eminent American protectionist Henry C. Carey. By the age of forty, however, he...

This study quantifies dynamic learning effects behind the tariff wall in the American pig iron industry in 1870-1940. First, we present new datasets to argue that imported and domestic pig iron were close substitutes. Next, we provide evidence for dynamic learning effects. Finally, we use the...

Several varieties of bilateral trade arrangements were tried in the United States from independence to 1909. They included most-favored-nation (MFN) treaties of the conditional and unconditional varieties, MFN treaties in which the conditionality was implicit, preferential trade arrangements,...

Commodities are often stored when the spot price exceeds the future price in a central market. Wright and Williams conjectured that inventories are held in locations far from the central market on these occasions. In these locations the spot price is lower than the price for forward delivery...