Jacob Bruggeman: Let’s stick on the U.S. for a moment. Later chapters in the book chart how ideas about free trade were reinvented in the late twentieth century as the Cold War waned, the Washington Consensus emerged, and politicians from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton embraced free trade as the symbol of a peaceful world order. These changes styled America as the leader of a world order built on free trade. You suggest this is something of an invented tradition that Cold War ideology has obscured from our rear view mirrors. In fact, the U.S. had bootstrapped itself, a century earlier, by wholeheartedly embracing the Listian program of economic nationalism. Explain why you see the U.S. as the paradigmatic example of List’s protectionist and national economic policies.
Marc-William Palen: Let’s pick up on where we left off with Friedrich List and the National System of Political Economy, which he publishes in 1841. List commits suicide not that long afterwards, but his ideas live on and he was instrumental in the growing popularity of the American System of protectionism in the 1800s. First the Whig Party took his ideas up, then the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln exemplified how this Whig protectionist strain took over the Republican Party. In contrast to the Democratic Party, which was the party of free trade in the early to mid 19th century, and often still closely tied to the defense of slavery. But as I show in this book and in my previous book, too, in the northeastern United States there’s also a left-wing abolitionist strand of free-trade ideology working behind the scenes within both the Republican and Democratic parties. But the point here is that, yes, the Republican Party was the party of antislavery, but once slavery comes to an end in 1865, they rebrand themselves as the party of protectionism. Republican economic nationalism has been written out of our history books in fascinating ways in ways I still can’t quite understand, I can only speculate on them. But domestic histories, foreign relations histories—they all deserve part of the blame for how we’ve forgotten that the Republican Party, and thus the United States itself, was fervently protectionist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The US Empire became a protectionist model for rival imperial powers to follow. The American System of protectionism was thus far more influential in shaping the imperial economic order of this era than British free trade. We can’t point to many places outside of Britain itself where the free traders were successful in spreading trade liberalization as ideology and policy, aside from the international grassroots anti-imperial and peace movements. This economic nationalist backdrop is essential for understanding how the US undergoes an economic revolution in the 1930s and 1940s when it turns towards free trade.