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.
Most Favored Nation: The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897–1912. By Paul Wolman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. xxv + 328 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95. ISBN 0-8078-2022-9
California national banks yield results showing integration, as do comparisons between San Francisco and Washington state. Oregon fails the tests completely. The benchmarking technique seems to complicate the study unnecessarily, especially when the selection of appropriate urban to rural comparisons seems arbitrary. Relying on national bank data is another obvious weakness, but this is less troubling because the conclusions seem to support my work on California, which relied on state bank data. Another problem is the failure to break the analysis into sub-periods. The years 1850-1920 mentioned in the book's title take the West Coast from purely extractive rural areas to nationally linked industrial bases. National banks did not exist in the Pacific Coast until 1871, and the tests described above cover only 1888 to 1911, but even this shorter period saw important changes in the economy. Although the tests described, presented in chapter 6, are the vital part of the book, other chapters present very brief descriptions of economic development in the West, the two largest regional banks of the early part of the era, and the development of the stock market and life insurance industries. There is also an interesting analysis of the behavior of the markets during panic and recession. This book should be included in any complete collection of U.S. financial history and would be useful as well for western economic historians, business historians comfortable with quantitative analysis, and those concerned with financial aspects of economic development.
Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe : the Commonwealth and Britain's applications to join the European Communities
Preface Notes on the Contributors Britain, The Commonwealth and Europe: An Overview D.Maitland 'The Jolly Old Empire': Labour, the Commonwealth and Europe, 1945-51 D.Russell Britain, the Commonwealth and Europe in the 1950s W.Nicoll The Australian Department of Trade and the EEC, 1956-61 J.O'Brien The Commonwealth in British European Policy: Politics and Sentiment, 1956-63 G.Wilkes 'Commonwealth or Europe?': Macmillan's Dilemma, 1961-63 A.May Commonwealth International Financial Arrangements and Britain's First Application to Join the EEC M.Kandiah & G.Staerck The Labour Government, Commonwealth Policy, and the Second Application to Join the EEC, 1964-67 P.R.Alexander The EEC and the Erosion of the Old Commonwealth Relationship S.Ward Index