ABSTRACT
The prevailing interpretation of international trade in history owes almost everything to their perception. In the early nineteenth century, it is usually assumed, countries were highly protectionist as they always had been, seeking advantages from international trade at the expense of others. As the extent to which the process of international development depended on mutually beneficial international exchanges was comprehended under the forceful influence of the industrial revolution in Western Europe, so were European tariffs increasingly modified to a point in mid-century where goods and factors flowed across frontiers with relative ease, at least until they reached Russia. It is still quite commonplace to discover the highly romanticised and entirely inaccurate image of the traveller of the 1860s setting forth across Europe, probably by the new international express trains, with no passport and no need of any other medium of exchange than gold francs or sovereigns. By the 1880s this image of peace and progress has dimmed. The world is explained as having slipped back to protectionism and its inevitable concomitants-nationalism, imperialism and militarism. In the interwar period this protectionism did not at first diminish and after 1929 reached new levels which made war inevitable. The United States Department of State based much of its planning for peace during the Second World War on the assumption that a peaceful world could not long endure the sorts of trading policies practised by Nazi Germany. The link between low tariffs, multilateralism and international peace thus received the most powerful of all official blessings. From 1958 onwards these goals were increasingly achieved, to the enormous economic and political benefit of much of the world, but the failure to cleave firmly enough to those policies threatens again to bring all the inevitable political disasters of protectionism in its train. ‘We are now’, argued a long anonymous article in Le Matin in January 1979, ‘in 1932.’ The article was headed ‘Demain, la guerre?’.
