Building on growing bodies of scholarship—ranging from cliometrics based on the “new-new trade theory” to international political economy—this session includes studies on the drivers of global market integration and disintegration, and the relationships between international trade and tariffs, political interest groups, transportation, economic ideas, and diplomacy, in Europe, North and South America, and Asia from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period. Collectively, we aim to deepen our understanding of how tariffs and other trade costs acted at the international level, and how trade policy was discussed, planned, and implemented in different countries and colonies. By adopting both cliometric and qualitative approaches, these papers aim to clarify the various responses to waves of globalization in different areas of the world, each of which was in different political-economic contexts but all of which had to adapt to globalizing markets.

In so doing, these papers ask two types of questions. On the one hand, cliometricians ask through what kind of mechanisms trade policies affected the shaping or dissolving of the global economy. How were trade volume and economic growth determined by tariffs, transportation fares, and other costs, as well as colonial, linguistic, and other socio-political variables? Was the decision-making on tariff rates influenced by political interest groups or by diplomatic treaty negotiations? On the other hand, transnational historians ask how and what kind of trade policies were implemented through domestic and diplomatic processes in different areas of the world. How did various economic integration movements affect policy making? Was there any academic communication among economists in the three regions regarding commercial policy at that time? As a whole, we ask how the difference in trade policy and other conditions affected the diverse results of economic globalization.

Our presentations are divided into two panels. In the first panel, Ryotaro Sugiyama will focus on the relation between the Tariff Reform movement in Britain and the social policy of the British Conservative party before 1914. The paper by José Alejandro Peres-Cajías and Agustina Rayes seeks to evaluate the controversy over Latin American protectionism during the First Globalization by looking at the import substitution industrialization in Argentina, the leading economy in the region on this issue. Using a new dataset disaggregated by product and trade partner for the universe of Japanese exports between 1880 and 1910, Christopher M. Meissner and John P. Tang find that extensive margins accounted for 30 percent of Japanese export growth, with trade costs and market size associated with successful market entry.

In the second panel, Toshiki Kawashima will examine how the network of commercial treaties in Central Europe before 1914 affected the renegotiation of unequal treaties in Meiji Japan. Marcela Sabaté and José María Serrano will deal with the reconstitution of a pro free-trade organization in Spain as a reaction, quite unique in Europe, to the protectionist backlash inaugurated by the German bill of 1879. Analyzing the impact of terms of trade and tariff rates on GDP after financial crises during the “first era of globalization,” Peter Bent’s paper suggests that national governments, through trade policies, played a more significant role in shaping economic outcomes during this period than is typically recognized.

The commentators on our panel are economic historians with a long-standing interest in the role of trade policy in globalization. Douglas Irwin, our first commentator, is one of the pioneers in the study of the relationships between trade policy and globalization. Markus Lampe, our second commentator, is known for his study of commercial treaties and international trade. Florian Ploeckl, our third commentator, studies the role of political-economic unification in market integration. Alexander J. Green, our fourth commentator, studies the relationship between the international grain markets and trade policies.