Free Trade and Protection in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisited: A Comment on Nye

Abstract

In a recent article in this JOURNAL, John V. Nye disputed the 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 Great Britain throughout most of the nineteenth century . . . British average tariff levels did not compare favorably with those of France till the 1880s and were not substantially lower for much of the time.2 In this comment I argue that the rate of tariff revenue is an inadequate and potentially misleading indicator of whether a country's commercial policy tends toward free trade or protection. In examining the structure of Britain's tariff in the second half of the nineteenth century, when those problems were particularly acute, I found that the tariff was carefully constructed to avoid protecting domestic producers. A cursory examination of French policy, by contrast, indicates that domestic producers were protected by substantial tariff barriers. In figure 1 of his article, Nye presented evidence on tariff revenue as a percentage of the total value of imports in Britain and France over the course of the nineteenth century. In the first half of the century, the average rate of tariff revenue appears initially to be much higher but to decline more rapidly in Britain than in France, until the rates converge in the two countries at about 5 to 10 percent around the 1860s. In the second half-century, the rates remain roughly stable at this level until the end of the century. Taking these tariff revenue measures as a proxy for average tariff levels in the two countries, Nye judged France to have been equally as liberal in its commercial policy as Britain was over the course of the nineteenth century, bringing into question what he believes to be the traditional view on the matter. Given these figures for the first half of the century, Nye asked, why have economic historians that Britain was the solitary free trader in the early to midnineteenth century?''3 This questioning of the conventional wisdom is curious, because no scholar of the period has disputed the fact that Britain's commercial policy was quite protectionist prior to the 1840s. What is disputable is using the rate of tariff revenue as the sole metric by which to rank-order two countries in terms of the liberality of their commercial policy, as Nye did when he concluded that there is little evidence that Britain's trade was substantially more open than that of France. . . . France's trade regime was more liberal than that of Great Britain.' 4 That rates of tariff revenue were higher in Britain than in France for some decades does not mean a priori that Britain was less open to trade than France: those data alone are not revealing about nominal or