John Nye: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’ve argued that we’ve underrated how free trade France was throughout much of the 19th century. What exactly is the myth there? And how would you describe the reality? That’s a long project I worked on for over 15 years of my life, and it led to my 2007 book, War, Wine, and Taxes. It starts from the fact when, early on in my career, I was doing some work in Second Empire France and looking at their tariff policies, and one of the things I did routinely was to compare average tariffs in Britain and France, something which apparently, at the time I was doing it, no one had ever bothered to do. One of the things that shocked me was that, from about the 1850s, or certainly the 1860s, to the end of the 19th century, France had, in fact, much earlier, going back to the ’30s, France seemed to have lower average tariffs than the British did, for I would say three-quarters of the 19th century. It’s not till the end of the 19th century that Britain catches up with France in terms of openness of trade. That led me to investigate both why this important fact was so misunderstood in economic history, that the French were, de facto, less protectionist in many ways than Britain for, say, more than half of the century, and why people didn’t notice that amid all the fanfare about the Corn Laws. What are the intellectual origins of this myth of free-trade Britain? Where does it come from? Are we overrating the British in every other way, or is there some specific reason?…

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