Description
The United States is entering a period of profound uncertainty in the world political economy--an uncertainty which is threatening the liberal economic order that its own statesmen created at the end of the Second World War. The storm surrounding this threat has been ignited by an issue that has divided Americans since the nation's founding: international trade. Is America better off under a liberal trade regime, or would protectionism be more beneficial? The issue divided Alexander Hamilton from Thomas Jefferson, the agrarian south from the industrializing north, and progressives from robber barons in the Gilded Age. In our own times, it has pitted anti-globalization activists and manufacturing workers against both multinational firms and the bulk of the economics profession.Ambassador C. Donald Johnson's The Wealth of a Nation is an authoritative history of the politics of trade in America from the Revolution to the Trump era. Johnson begins by charting the rise and fall of the U.S. protectionist system from the time of Alexander Hamilton to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930. Challenges to protectionist dominance were frequent and often serious, but the protectionist regime only faded in the wake of the Great Depression. After World War II, America was the primary architect of the liberal rules-based economic order that has dominated the globe for over half a century. Recent years, however, have seen a swelling anti-free trade movement that casts the postwar liberal regime as anti-worker, pro-capital, and--in Donald Trump's view--even anti-American. In this riveting history, Johnson emphasizes the benefits of the postwar free trade regime, but focuses in particular on how it has attempted to advance workers' rights. This analysis of the evolution of American trade policy stresses the critical importance of the multilateral trading system's survival and defines the central political struggle between business and labor in measuring the wealth of a nation.
Table of Contents
List of FiguresPrefaceAcknowledgments Introduction: The Battle in Seattle and Adam SmithPART ONE: FROM HAMILTON TO SMOOT- HAWLEY: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE US PROTECTIONIST SYSTEM1 "A Genuine American System"2 Crisis, Compromise, and Free Trade in the Jacksonian Democracy3 Civil War and Robber Barons4 The Gilded Age of Protectionism5 Trade Reform in the Progressive Era6 The Roaring Twenties and the Path to Smoot- HawleyPART TWO: THE TRANSFORMATION: THE CREATION OF THE LIBERAL ECONOMIC ORDER7 FDR and Cordell Hull8 The Brain Trust9 The Dawn of the Multilateral Trading System10 The Anglo- American Special Relationship11 The Postwar Atlantic Alliance12 The Birth of GATT13 The Havana CharterPART THREE: THE SURVIVAL OF THE SYSTEM14 A New Economic Order?15 Labor's Love Is Lost16 Advancing Worker Rights beyond the WTOConclusion: Donald Trump, the Forgotten Man, and the Liberal Economic OrderNotes Bibliography About the AuthorIndex
