The most notable idea of Charles P. Kindleberger’s later career is the value of a single country acting as stabilizer of an international economy prone to instability. It runs through his widely read books, "The World in Depression, 1929-1939" (1973), "Manias, Crises, and Panics" (1978), "A...

Free trade and protectionist doctrines have long had ambiguous relationships to bilateral trade deals, known throughout the nineteenth century as “reciprocity” arrangements. Henry C. Carey, “the Ajax of Protection” in the nineteenth-century United States, represents well the ambiguity...

The first chairman of the U.S. Tariff Commission, Frank W. Taussig, expected the new body to put an end to “haphazard” and “irresponsible” management of trade policy. Reforming trade agreements was a top priority. In 1922, acting on the Commission’s weighty report, Reciprocity and...

Books reviewed: Paul C. Cheshire and Edwin S. Mills (eds.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, Vol. 3: Applied Urban Economics Donald G. Janelle and David C. Hodge (eds.), Information, Place, and Cyberspace: Issues in Accessibility Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception Office...

Condy Raguet (1784-1842) was the first Chargé d'Affaires from the United States to Brazil and a conspicuous author of political economy from the 1820s to the early 1840s. He contributed to the era's free-trade doctrine as editor of influential periodicals, most notably The Banner of the...

During much of the previous era of globalization, from the 1860s until the First World War, U.S. tariffs were surprisingly high. Present-day economic historians have suggested that U.S. protection as the result of a backlash against globalization that was the beginning of its decline. They have...

In two pairs of episodes, first in 1824 and 1846 and then in 1892 and 1935, similar U.S.- Colombia trade agreements or their enabling laws were embraced first by protectionists and then by free traders. The history of the episodes supports the view that although political institutions exist to...