The Optimal Tariff in the Antebellum United States

Abstract

Virtually from its founding the United States has not followed a free-trade policy. Tariffs were the principal source of federal revenue in the nineteenth century and protection of domestic industries was a significant factor as well from the first tariff act of 1789 onward (see Frank Taussig, pp. 14-15). One of the more interesting (and controversial, at least in the antebellum period) questions in American economic history as well as in international trade and development is what the effects of such a protective policy in fact were. It is well known that a country with monopoly power in international trade can improve its lot over the free-trade equilibrium. Up to some point by increasing its tariff, it should be able by improving its terms of trade also to increase national welfare. The antebellum United States may well have had such power due to its position as the major world supplier of raw cotton. In the period between 1840 and 1860, the United States produced almost two-thirds of world cotton output, while the United Kingdom, the major customer of new cotton, purchased

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.