The Wealth of a Nation: A History of Trade Politics in America

Abstract

C. Donald Johnson's book is a history of U.S. trade policy from the early years of the Republic to the first year of the Trump administration. Though this lengthy book encompasses the entire sweep of U.S. history, its focus is the post–World War II triumph of an American-led liberal trade order and the threat to that system posed by public disapproval and its avatar, President Donald J. Trump. The book is framed by a cautionary tale about the Chinese Empire in the early fifteenth century, which, according to Johnson, squandered its economic and military dominance by retreating from trade—dominance that it has taken nearly five centuries to regain. The choice the United States faces in the twenty-first century is therefore to either maintain its openness to trade or to wither away behind its own “great wall.” Johnson aims to counter a perception that open markets favor big businesses over working people by invoking Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776)—described as the “foundational reference” of Johnson's book (p. xiii). Johnson asserts that free trade as outlined by Smith is a political economy that supports workers against the interests of aristocracy and monopoly. Historically this is evidenced, Johnson argues, by the growth of monopoly and corruption during the protectionist Gilded Age. Progressive reformers, Johnson shows, took aim at this system in the early twentieth century before Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of state, Cordell Hull, finally removed tariff-making powers from Congress in 1934 and laid the foundation for the multilateralism of the postwar era.