ABSTRACT
Two-hundred years after Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s (as well as the other classical economists) prescription about the supposedly beneficial effects of free trade, trade policy orientation still constitutes a major bone of contention among economists, as in the public and the media. More than in any other area of human knowledge, the conviction of laymen and experts alike seems difficult to sway, grounded as it is in people’s political beliefs. These, in turn, are based on, or at least linked to, a representation and an understanding of past episodes of human history – of economic history in fact. To paraphrase Keynes, “intellectuals are usually the slaves of some defunct economic historian”.1
