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The advent of the National Policy in 1879 brought dramatic changes in the structure, magnitude, and objectives of Canada's tariff policy. No longer used primarily as a source of revenue for the government, tariffs on imported goods assumed a role as protector of Canadian industry against the encroachment of foreign imports on the Canadian market. In this detailed account of events leading up to the adoption of the National Policy, Ben Forster explores a wide range of political and economic forces and races their influence on successive Liberal and Conservative governments. He examines the pamphlet literature of the protectionists, the private corespondence of political leaders and protectionists, the public press of the day, and legislative journals and other public documents. He weaves the threads of various interests - business, industry, agriculture, and government - into a comprehensive account of the growth of protectionist feeling in Canada. Forster's analysis illuminates a critical chapter in Canadian political history, one with implications for current discussions on import quotas, industrial policy, and free trade

On 2 July 1812, Captain David Porter raised a banner on the USS Essex proclaiming 'a free trade and sailors rights', thus creating a political slogan that explained the War of 1812. Free trade demanded the protection of American commerce, while sailors' rights insisted that the British end the impressment of seamen from American ships. Repeated for decades in Congress and in taverns, the slogan reminds us today that the second war with Great Britain was not a mistake. It was a contest for the ideals of the American Revolution bringing together both the high culture of the Enlightenment to establish a new political economy and the low culture of the common folk to assert the equality of humankind. Understanding the War of 1812 and the motto that came to explain it – free trade and sailors' rights – allows us to better comprehend the origins of the American nation.

In the nineteenth century Adam Smith and others gradually invented a 'tradition' of free trade. This was a towering achievement and has proved to be influential to this day. This book examines this construction of the free trade tradition. Showing how historical contruction is a vital component in the writing of doctrinal history, Lars Magnusson argues that it is important for historians of economic thought to distance themselves from the practice of writing history backwards. Contrasting what occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century with what occurred in the United States and in Sweden, this book shows that perhaps the classical tradition meant something else entirely in different national contexts. This original and thought-provoking book is written such that it will be of great interest not only to historians specializing in economic thought, but also historians with other areas of interest. 1. The Invention of a Tradition of Free Trade - An Introduction 2. The Heritage from Smith and Classical Political Economy 3. The Innovation of a Tradition - From the Corn Law to the Fair Trade Controversy 4. The Historical Construction of Mercantilism 5. The American System 6. The Three Systems of Political Economy - A Swedish Case of Translation 7. Epilogue

Societal Impact Statement Increasing crop productivity is often proposed as a key goal for meeting the food security demands of a growing global population. However, achieving high crop yields alone without meeting end‐use quality requirements is counter to this objective and can lead to negative environmental and sustainability issues. High yielding feed wheat crops in the United Kingdom are a typical example of this. The historical context of UK agricultural industrialisation, developments in plant breeding and wheat end‐use processing are examined. We then outline how employing innovations in plant breeding methods offer the potential to redress the balance between wheat quantity and quality. Summary Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) has historically been an important crop for many human civilisations. Today, variability in wheat supply and trade has a large influence on global economies and food security. The United Kingdom is an example of an industrialised country that achieves high wheat yields through intensive cropping systems and a favourable climate. However, only a minority of the wheat grain produced is of suitable end‐use quality for modern bread baking methods and most wheat produced is fed to livestock. A large agricultural land area and input use dedicated to producing grain for animal rather than human food has wide‐ranging negative impacts for environmental sustainability and domestic food production. Here we present an historical perspective of agricultural and economic changes that have resulted in UK production primarily focussing on wheat quantity over quality. Agricultural intensification, liberalisation of free trade in agricultural commodities, innovations in the milling and baking sector, developments in scientific understanding of genetics and plant breeding, and geopolitical changes have all played a role. We propose that wheat breeding plays a crucial role in influencing these issues and although wheat breeders in the United Kingdom have historically applied the most‐up‐to‐date scientific advances, recent advances in genomics tools and quantitative genetics present a unique opportunity for breeders to redress the balance between quantity and quality. El incremento en la producción de cultivos es un objetivo clave comúnmente propuesto para atender las demandas de seguridad alimentaria de una población global en crecimiento. Sin embargo, un aspecto detrimental para este objetivo es alcanzar altos rendimientos de los cultivos sin los requerimientos de calidad de uso final y puede generar problemas de tipo ambiental y de sostenibilidad. En el Reino Unido, los altos rendimientos de grano de cultivos de trigo usados para alimentación son un ejemplo típico de esto. Hemos examinado el contexto histórico de la industrialización de la agricultura, desarrollos en el fitomejoramiento y calidad de uso final del grano del trigo en el Reino Unido. En este contexto, hemos descrito como el uso de innovaciones en los métodos de fitomejoramiento ofrecen el potencial para compensar el balance entre la cantidad y la calidad del grano del trigo. Pour assurer la sécurité alimentaire d'une population mondiale qui continue de croitre, il est souvent proposé d'augmenter les rendements agricoles. Cependant, il est aussi important de s'assurer que la qualité des récoltes soit suffisante pour l'alimentation humaine, faute de quoi les conséquences environnementales sont très lourdes. La production de blé à hauts rendements destinée à l'alimentation animale au Royaume‐Uni est un exemple intéressant sur lequel nous nous penchons dans cet article. Le contexte historique, l'industrialisation de la production de blé, le développement de sélection de variétés et les procédés d'utilisation de blé pour le pain et autres produits qui ont conduit à la situation actuelle y sont discutés. Des méthodes innovantes dans le domaine de la sélection du blé sont aussi présentées. Celles‐ci offrent des opportunités permettant d'assurer une production de blé de qualité et en quantité suffisante pour l'alimentation humaine. Increasing crop productivity is often proposed as a key goal for meeting the food security demands of a growing global population. However, achieving high crop yields alone without meeting end‐use quality requirements is counter to this objective and can lead to negative environmental and sustainability issues. High yielding feed wheat crops in the United Kingdom are a typical example of this. The historical context of UK agricultural industrialisation, developments in plant breeding and wheat end‐use processing are examined. We then outline how employing innovations in plant breeding methods offer the potential to redress the balance between wheat quantity and quality.

This is the biography of the legendary reformer, intellectual and colonial governor, Sir John Bowring (1792-1872). Bowring was the archetype of the ambitious men who made Britain the leading global power in the 19th century. He was a high-profile advocate of free trade. As a member of the parliament he supported full suffrage and other radical causes. He then became an industrial entrepreneur. And in 1848, he took a job as consul in Canton, which led to the governorship of Hong Kong. This book brings his life and disparate achievements together, with a particular emphasis on his role in promoting free trade.

The overlapping and interacting forces that caused a Conservative government to repeal the protectionist Corn Laws against its own political principles and economic interests: extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis.

The usual story of the 'first era of globalization' at the end of the nineteenth century sees Denmark as something of an outlier: a country which, like the UK, resisted the globalization backlash in the wake of the inflow of cheap grain from the New World, but where agriculture, rather than going into decline, in fact flourished. Key to the success of Danish agriculture was an early diversification towards dairy production. This article challenges this simple story which sees Denmark as something of a liberal paragon. Denmark's success owed much to a prudent use of trade policy which favoured dairy production. Moreover, this favouritism continued even after a more general movement to free trade in the 1860s. Using micro-level data from individual dairies, we quantify the implied subsidy to dairy production from the tariffs, and demonstrate that in many cases this ensured the profitability of individual dairies.

The twelve essays in this collection focus on the first commercial encounters between an ancient China on the verge of systemic social transformations, and a fledgling United States, struggling to assert itself globally as a distinct nation after the Revolutionary War with Great Britain. In early accounts of these encounters, commercial activity enabled cross-cultural curiosity, communication and even mutual respect but also occasioned confrontation as ambitious traders in early American companies pursued lucrative opportunities, often embracing a British mode of imperialism in the name of “free trade.” The book begins in the 1780s with the arrival in Canton of the very first American ship The Empress of China and moves through the nineteenth century, with Caleb Cushing negotiating the Treaty of Wangxia (1844) in Macau after the First Opium War and, at the century’s close, Secretary of State John Hay forging the Open Door Policy (1899). Because it is not possible to consider Sino-American relations in a vacuum, the essays remain attuned to the contemporaneous involvement of competing European trading partners, especially the British, in Canton, Macao, and the general region of Pearl River Delta. All of the essays address the history of American-Chinese commerce to recover a prescient dialogue or scene of exchange that resonates in the current tensions and promises of world financial reform. The interdisciplinary essays anchor big ideas in the careful analysis of specific literary, diplomatic, and epistolary writings, and the collection as a whole develops a rich visual dimension to the historical record. The result is an engaging and qualitatively collaborative book that brings to life a fascinating story of antagonism and collaboration between two countries that followed very different paths on route to becoming economic superpowers of the early twenty first century.

The core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy—equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual—have long been defined almost exclusively by the Bank War, which commenced in earnest with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Yet, this same rhetoric proved far more pervasive and consistent when one considers the ardent opposition to the protective system. Opponents of the protective tariff, commencing with the Tariff of 1816 and continuing unabated to the Walker Tariff of 1846, thus contributed directly to the development of Jacksonian Democracy, and, by introducing and continually employing this language, gave to the tariff debates in the United States a unique angle that differed from the debates in Europe.

We analyse the Swedish general elections that took place in spring and autumn 1887. Our aim is to discover which groups of voters supported free trade and which protectionism. We find that while capital owners and wage earners consistently favoured free trade, in the spring election only the largest farmers supported protectionism. By autumn, political preferences among smallholders and middling farmers had shifted in favour of protectionism too. As these groups were not specialised in the production of import-competing goods, we assume that the political landslide in the autumn elections can be attributed to a loss of trust in the government.