Martin Wolf has plenty of kind words for Erik Reinert and Ha-Joon Chang, but he’s critical too:

Reinert argues: “US industrial policy from 1820 to 1900 is probably the best example for Third World countries to follow today until these countries are ready to benefit from international trade.”… Yet this example makes no sense for most, if not all, contemporary developing countries. The technological gap between the UK and the US in the 19th century was trivial by comparison with that between, say, the US and Ethiopia today. Even so it took more than half a century for the US to close it.

The US was also a vast continental country, capable of attracting a huge immigrant workforce, much of it educated, and so generate a domestic market large enough to exhaust the economies of scale offered by the technology of the time, while still permitting strong domestic competition. That proved not to be the case even for India, a giant among developing countries. This is, to put it mildly, hardly a model for Ethiopia, let alone Chad.

Few (I would argue, no) contemporary developing countries are big or technologically sophisticated enough to make a decent job of the 19th-century protectionist model.

Moreover, as Douglas Irwin noted in reviewing Chang’s previous book:

[T]he United States started out as a very wealth country with a high literacy rate, widely distributed land ownership, stable government and competitive political institutions that largely guaranteed the security of private property, a large internal market with free trade in goods and free labor mobility across regions, etc. Given these overwhelmingly favorable conditions, even very inefficient trade policies could not have prevented economic advances from taking place.

Nonetheless, Wolf concurs with the globalization dissidents that developing countries ought to have the freedom to err (“policy space” as they say, to explore potentially constructive forms of protectionism). In some areas, such as intellectual property, this is the professional consensus and the only disagreement comes from industry lobbyists. In other areas, the debate will rage on.