RECIPROCITY AND HENRY C. CAREY’S TRAVERSES ON “THE ROAD TO PERFECT FREEDOM OF TRADE”
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, embodies the ambiguity from one side of the controversy. Carey’s early adulthood in the mid- to late 1820s was a time when the forerunners of the Whig Party pursued reciprocity at least partly as a means of fostering protection. In the 1830s, Carey, too, endorsed reciprocity—because he stood for free trade and believed reciprocity would promote it. In the 1840s and 1850s Carey changed his mind, decided that protection was the real “road to perfect freedom of trade,” and for that reason opposed reciprocity with Canada. In the 1870s he remained a protectionist but reconciled his doctrine with reciprocity. This article attempts to explain the changes in the disposition toward reciprocity of America’s foremost protectionist thinker from the Second Party System to the generation after the Civil War.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF SECESSION
Economic analyses of American Civil War causation typically focus on longue durée structural arguments neglecting specific context and contemporary observers’ predictions about disunion’s effects. This article suggests secession heightened concern about government solvency and intensified a conversation about the nature of American inter- and intra-national trade, one hinging on ideas about relative dependence and positioning within the world economy. Deep South secessionists rested their claims on a cotton-centric economic worldview, trusting that their coveted commodity could finance independence and attract foreign partners. Pro-compromise northerners greatly feared that possibility. Less compromising Republican political economists countered that secession would reveal northern economic superiority and the South’s underlying weakness, eventually leading to voluntary reunion. Though competing sides envisioned peaceful pathways towards their ends, the actions of insolvent central governments—who feared that any compromise on contested forts and revenue ports would undermine the confidence of underwriters—militated against these imagined peaceful ends.
Creating the Virtual Universe
Simulation software is important to our understanding of the universe. The intrinsic multiphysics aspects are spiced with a range of temporal scales and spatial scales, both of which cover more digits than are available in the standard hardware. This, together with the intrinsic chaotic nature of many physical processes, poses quite a challenge. To meet this challenge, researchers developed the Astronomical Multipurpose Environment (AMUSE). Instead of writing a suite of multiphysics solvers from scratch, AMUSE's developers coupled existing solvers for each physical ingredient. The result is a highly inhomogeneous collection of dedicated solvers with a homogeneous protocol that scales to supercomputers.