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Oxford The Wealth of a Nation A History of Trade Politics in America 2018 Edition by C. Donald Johnson
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 free-trade regime, or has protectionism been more beneficial? The issuedivided Alexander Hamilton from Thomas Jefferson, the slaveholding south from the industrializing north, and populists and industrialists 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 theeconomics profession. Former U.S. Trade Representative C. Donald Johnson's The Wealth of a Nation is an authoritative history of the politics of trade in America from the Founding to the Trump era. He 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 Two,America was the primary architect of the liberal free-trade economic order that ended up dominating 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-evenanti-American. In the course of this riveting history, Johnson emphasizes the benefits that have flowed from the postwar free trade regime, but focuses in particular on how it has helped American workers. Augmenting the system with new policies that address the negative effects of free trade is far more likely to help them than jettisoning it for a protectionist regime. As he stresses, free trade should not be the issue because it helps create wealth. Rather the central political issue remainsas it always has been: how will business and labor share the wealth of the 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 SYSTEM 1 "A Genuine American System" 2 Crisis, Compromise, and Free Trade in the Jacksonian Democracy 3 Civil War and Robber Barons 4 The Gilded Age of Protectionism 5 Trade Reform in the Progressive Era 6 The Roaring Twenties and the Path to Smoot- Hawley PART TWO: THE TRANSFORMATION: THE CREATION OF THE LIBERAL ECONOMIC ORDER 7 FDR and Cordell Hull 8 The Brain Trust 9 The Dawn of the Multilateral Trading System 10 The Anglo- American Special Relationship 11 The Postwar Atlantic Alliance 12 The Birth of GATT 13 The Havana Charter PART THREE: THE SURVIVAL OF THE SYSTEM 14 A New Economic Order? 15 Labor's Love Is Lost 16 Advancing Worker Rights beyond the WTO Conclusion: Donald Trump, the Forgotten Man, and the Liberal Economic Order Notes Bibliography About the AuthorIndex