ABSTRACT
Introduction Today, the idea of government intervention seems to be slowly recovering from the surge of bad press it had been receiving in both the scientifi c and the public debate ever since the early seventies. Especially during the eighties, neoliberal theory discredited all sorts of market regulation.1 The so-called ‘infant industry’ theory is one of the rare economic arguments in defence of interventionist, protectionist policies that remained fairly widely accepted throughout the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries. Indeed it is the only argument that – through the protection of budding national industries, usually by imposing restrictive import tariffs on competing goods – actually claims increased long-term economic prosperity for all parties involved, and not just for the domestic economy or the targeted sector.2 However, even the infant industry approach has, from its conception, caused major controversy among economists and more recently also within history departments, where uncovering the causes of economic development remains one of the leading challenges.
