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.
HENRY CAREY’S RURAL ROOTS, “SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE,” AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE ANTEBELLUM NORTH
The American political economist Henry Charles Carey is generally thought of as a spokesman for industrialization due to his strident protectionism. In fact, his most original contributions came in his discussions of agriculture, the environment, and their relation to technological progress. Carey developed his ideas by drawing on the contemporary discourse of “scientific agriculture,” which enjoyed great influence, thanks to a widespread agricultural reform movement. This allowed him to argue effectively against Malthusian population doctrine and Ricardian rent theory by stressing the almost limitless potential of technological innovation, not only in manufactures but also in agriculture. Analogous views were also expressed by George Perkins Marsh, known today as the “father of conservationism,” indicating a broader contemporary engagement with questions of economic development and humanity’s relationship to nature, an engagement in some ways strikingly parallel to present-day concerns.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.