This book has been a long time in coming, and I have racked up large debts in the process of bringing this project to completion. Michael Bordo gets my first thanks for having, unwittingly, in a phone call in 1994, put me onto the subject of the history of US trade policy. Barry Eichengreen has been a role model for anyone working at the intersection of international economics and economic history, and I am grateful for his support and the example of his scholarship. I also give thanks to Jagdish Bhagwati and Ronald Findlay for indelibly influencing the way I think about international trade and commercial policy.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, under the leadership of Martin Feldstein and James Poterba, has provided an important venue in which I have presented many of the research papers that have been integrated into this volume. My thinking has been shaped and sharpened by participating in the research meetings of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy Program, headed by Claudia Goldin, and the International Trade and Investment Program, headed by Robert Feenstra. Many participants at the NBER conferences and program meetings have given valuable feedback over the years. I particularly appreciate Price Fishback’s enthusiastic encouragement and Claudia Goldin’s long-standing support for this project.
A few heroic individuals took the time to read the entire manuscript—sometimes twice!—and provide detailed comments: Anne Krueger, Steve Meardon, Chad Bown, Mac Destler, and Doug Nelson. I cannot thank them enough for their time and effort in helping improve the manuscript, although I am sure the book would have been better if I had taken all of their advice. J. Michael Finger provided helpful comments on several chapters, and Susan Aaronson gave valuable early feedback. Long ago, I benefited from two manuscript review sessions, one at Dartmouth (including Robert Baldwin, Doug Nelson, Steve Meardon, and Nina Pacvnik) and the other at the University of California at Berkeley (organized by Barry Eichengreen and including Barry Weingast, Christina Romer, Brad DeLong, Judith Goldstein, Gavin Wright, Andrew Guzman, Alan Taylor, John Wallis, and Robert Feenstra).
A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gave me extra time that allowed me to make great progress on this book, as did a sabbatical leave at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
At Dartmouth, I am deeply grateful to Michael Mastanduno and Nancy Marion for providing support that was absolutely essential to the completion of this book. Meir Kohn has long provided wise and needed advice as I struggled with this project. This book could not have been written without the superb collection of government documents and other materials in the Dartmouth College library. I thank John Cocklin for his many years of expert assistance with government documents. Dartmouth has a large collection of first-rate international economists, and my colleagues, especially Nina Pavcnik, have offered valuable comments, as have colleagues in the history department. For his superb assistance with the maps, I thank Jonathan Chipman, Director of the Citrin Family GIS/Applied Spatial Analysis Laboratory at Dartmouth College. Kory Hirak and Kristine Timlake saved me huge amounts of time in dealing with various aspects of the manuscript drafts. Finally, I am delighted to thank several generations of Dartmouth students for their invaluable research assistance: William Congdon, Amie Sugarman, Elise Waxenberg, Kristin Ricci, Maha Malik, Konrad von Moltke, Andres Isaza, Robert Klingenberger, Taylor Ng, Emma Ratcliffe, and April Liu.
My interest in trade policy was cultivated long ago by Bernard Gordon and fostered by Jagdish Bhagwati and Ronald Findlay. It was further stimulated by my spending an exciting year at the Council of Economic Advisers in 1986–87, where I worked on many of the issues discussed in chapter 12. This year gave me an amazing opportunity to see how the trade-policy process works in the federal government, and I learned an enormous amount from those at the CEA, the Office of the US Trade Representative, and the Office of Management and Budget, especially Thomas Dorsey. I am particularly grateful to Steven Husted and Gordon Rausser for their guidance and for letting me attend policy meetings above my level on trade and agriculture during that year. I also learned a tremendous amount from Michael Mussa then and thereafter.
I am saddened that Robert Baldwin, Michael Mussa, and Colin Campbell passed away before I could complete this book. Their encouragement help me stick with it.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Marjorie Rose. We met at the very moment that we both first reported for work at the Council of Economic Advisers. We have been together ever since, and she has patiently tolerated my obsession with trade policy and arcane history. Without her mantra “structure and purpose,” you would not be reading these words or holding this book. I am forever grateful to her.