Doug Irwin: evaluation

Transcript context

…You mentioned to me in an email before this chat, a notion of understanding the American Revolution in part as America’s early version of Brexit. Could you explain that for us a little more? Sure. The Founding Fathers really didn’t want to lose market access to the British Empire. We wanted our political independence. We didn’t want taxation without representation. We thought, long term, we’re very integrated with the British economy. We should maintain that integration. There was this hope, and actually there’s some reason for the hope, after we had won the war, that Britain would be magnanimous, and we could maintain our trading status within the context of the British Empire. But of course, the British didn’t see it that way. They said, “OK, if you want your political independence, you’re going to get your economic independence as well. All the privileges that you used to have, they’re out the window. You’re now outside the British Empire.” I don’t think the Founding Fathers really anticipated that this would be the case, and they spent a lot of the 1780s trying to claw their way back into the British Empire and got absolutely no give from the British authorities. A lot of this had to do with the Constitution itself and the formation of the Constitution as a way of allowing 13 independent states to sort of band together and have negotiating authority against other powers, which we didn’t have during this period. So the Constitution is very much an outgrowth of US trade politics during this time. Revenue, of course, was another key consideration there since, under the Articles of Confederation, Congress couldn’t raise funds. We had these big deficits, and the debts couldn’t be financed. So I think it was a Brexit gone badly. In fact, economic historians Jeff Williamson and Peter Lindert have a book just a couple years ago on American wealth over time. And once again, the data are sketchy. When you look at American wealth and income in 1776 or the early 1770s, and then you look at it in the 1790s, we’re basically, after 20 years or so, just getting back to where we were before. A lot of people think this is possibly worse than the Great Depression in terms of the impact on the economic activity of the United States. It wasn’t just the revolution. The 1780s was not a good decade, partly because our trade had been so severely disrupted by being outside the British Empire. Let’s shift to Broadway for a moment, Alexander Hamilton. Was he at the time, in fact, the founding American protectionist?…

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