If you enjoy learning about the history of trade theory and the history of trade policy, then you’ll likely enjoy reading “A Tale of Two Tariff Commissions and One Dubious ‘Globalization Backlash'” (PDF) by Stephen Meardon.

The article presents a history of the American tariff controversies after the Civil War. Meardon focuses on the roles of two important free traders: Arthur Latham Perry and David Wells, who are largely unknown to modern students of international economics. He argues that those who believe that “that the previous globalization sowed the seeds of its own destruction” by its impact on income distribution have the history backwards, and that “[t]he arguments relating to income class, distribution and power belonged to free traders,” not protectionists. These ideas matter: “What we include or omit in history signals the ideas that capture our attention and will likely shape the policies to come.”

Excerpts below the fold (and hat tip to Richard Baldwin for the link).

An idea that is almost as conventional as the U thesis holds that the previous globalization sowed the seeds of its own destruction. Its consequences for income distribution impelled populations and their political representatives to unlink their capital, labor, and commodities markets from the world economy… the lesson of the backlash thesis is heard as this: attend to the inequities that globalization breeds, or people will not accept globalization…

Concerning the ideas that sustained protection for half a century, what emerges from the history is that they cannot, without contortions, be said to have manifested backlash. Concerning the ideas that were bested, what emerges is their salience nonetheless in policy debates—and in light of their salience, the surprising extent to which history has forgotten, if not the ideas themselves, their chief exponents and the interests they represented…

To participants in the American tariff controversies of the 1860s and the rest of the century, free trade was associated with the arguments, and the particular personage, of Arthur Latham Perry. The last statement may appear hyperbolic considering Perry’s virtual absence from the history of economics. His nonappearance in Schumpeter’s and Spiegel’s texts is mirrored in the literature canvassed by the Social Sciences Citation Index. Searching the Index for all articles citing Perry in the quarter century from 1978 to 2002, one finds five… The neglect is curious. Perry was the most widely read American economist of his time…

The legislative momentum favoring greater protection compelled the opposition to organize. The American Free Trade League was founded in 1867 in New York City with the renowned man of letters William Cullen Bryant as its President and Perry on its General Council…

On March 3, 1865, Congress authorized a commission to study the country’s revenue needs and to recommend revisions of its labyrinthine war taxes. [David A.]Wells seemed a good choice for the task…

The majority of Congress would soon regret that they kept Wells on. A further misstep was to keep Wells without Colwell; a fatal one was to grant him the travel money… On July 12 McCulloch wrote to him that “Some of our high-tariff men are very apprehensive that you will become too much indoctrinated with free trade notions by a visit to England” (Wells, Papers, 12 July 1867). Their apprehensions were borne out: Wells changed his mind. Upon his return he joined Perry as one of America’s most prominent and vociferous opponents of protective tariffs…

Wells’s report provoked a furor among many of his former supporters and propelled the public debate on tariff policy. Theories and theoreticians of free trade and protection were at the very center of the debate…

[A] wedge had already begun to divide the Republican Party as its business constituents backed protection while abolitionists favored free trade. Anti-slavery luminaries William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Ward Beecher, and William Cullen Bryant extended the principles of their cause seamlessly to free trade…

[A] fear of exploitation of the poor by the rich was not a characteristic of protectionist arguments in the United States of the late nineteenth century. Rather, the burden of the protectionist argument was to persuade the public that protective tariffs served the interests of American farmers and manufacturers, capitalists and workers, rich and poor alike. In one way or another all of them were set against foreign nations and a few importers who were held to be their pawns. The arguments relating to income class, distribution and power belonged to free traders…

What we include or omit in history signals the ideas that capture our attention and will likely shape the policies to come. “Globalization backlash” has a foothold in history, despite the evidence given here—while Arthur Latham Perry does not, despite the evidence given here— because of an idea. The idea is that opposition to free trade is a stance favoring the powerful above the bereft of power, the moneyed over the dispossessed.