The dramatic implosion and regionalization of international trade during the 1930s has often been blamed on the trade and foreign exchange policies that emerged in the interwar period. We provide new evidence on the impact of trade and currency blocs on trade flows from 1928 1938 that suggests a...

This paper pursues the comparison of economic integration today and pre 1914 for trade as well as finance, primarily for the United States but also with reference to the wider world. We establish the outlines of international integration a century ago and analyze the institutional and...

The Great Depression was marked by a severe outbreak of protectionist trade policies. But contrary to the presumption that all countries scrambled to raise trade barriers, there was substantial cross-country variation in the movement to protectionism. Specifically, countries that remained on the...

While many political scientists and diplomatic historians see the Bush presidency as a distinctive epoch in American foreign policy, we argue that there was no Bush Doctrine in foreign economic policy. The Bush administration sought to advance a free trade agenda but could not avoid the use of...

This paper investigates the theory and evidence that history plays a role in shaping the direction of international trade. Because there are reasons to anticipate a positive correlation between the predominant direction of trade flows in the past and membership in preferential arrangements in...