ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, John V. Nye disputed the “conventional wisdom” that Britain was a paragon of free trade and France a practitioner of protection in the nineteenth century. Nye’s case is based primarily on figures for tariff revenue as a percentage of the value of imports, calculated using various weights. These figures, as Nye interprets them, “suggest that France’s trade regime was more liberal than that of Britain throughout most of the nineteenth century . . . British average tariff levels did not compare favorably with those of France until the 1880s and were not substantially lower for much of the time.”
