America's Neglected Protectionist Tradition: The Economics That Forged a Nation

America’s Neglected Protectionist Tradition rediscovers the economic ideas that built America by offering the most comprehensive treatment of the American protectionist school of economic thought. By tracing the School’s origins from Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe, it highlights the School’s dynamic and invention-driven alternative that rivalled English classical economics.

America’s Neglected Protectionist Tradition offers the most comprehensive treatment of the American protectionist school of economic thought – an intellectual tradition which originated with the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Tench Coxe, and was developed further by thinkers such as Friedrich List, John Rae, and Henry Charles Carey. This work provides the first systematic account of the philosophy and theory of the American protectionist tradition by drawing upon the full corpus of their literature, which includes the writings of nearly seventy statesmen and economists.

In reconstructing their system of thought, America’s Neglected Protectionist Tradition demonstrates that the American protectionists represented a coherent and systematic school of economic thought, and one that rivalled their English classical counterparts. Against the conventional literature on the topic, which treats American Protectionist thought as merely an adaptation of English classical economics, this work demonstrates that the American Protectionists developed a distinctive approach to economics. Not only did they differ from the Classicals on the policy recommendations concerning international trade, they rejected basic assumptions of the English classicals which remain foundational to contemporary economic analysis. Central to the thinking of the American protectionist tradition is the idea of the economy as dynamic and inventive. Rather than seeing scarce resources as placing fixed limits on economic progress, the American protectionists looked to invention, human ingenuity, and the diversity of talents and aptitudes as the means of forging the wealth of nations. Among other areas of economic analysis, this work explores the American protectionists’ support for economic diversification, which stands in contrast with free trade theory’s emphasis on specialisation. By challenging the Classical view that individuals represent homogeneous and uniform factors of production, the protectionists saw mankind as possessing unique talents, aptitudes and dispositions. Protected diversification was thus necessary to allow individuals to exercise these unique qualities. By recovering this neglected tradition, this work not only fills a significant gap in the history of economic thought but also provides valuable historical perspective on contemporary debates regarding trade and industrial policy, technological innovation and economic development.