How do crises affect trade policy? We reconcile starkly diverging accounts in the literature by showing that economic adversity generates endogenous incentives not only for protection, but also for liberalization. We first develop formally the mechanisms by which two features of shocks -...

Conventional wisdom holds that colonial trading relations were a one-way street: trade policy coerced colonies to export raw materials to the metropole and in turn purchase large quantities of manufactured goods from the empire’s industrial centers, thus hamstringing local industries. We argue...