Focusing on the same period as Chapter 2, Chapter 3 treats economic history. It engages with recent historiographical debates regarding the late medieval economy, especially as those debates pertain to Catalonia. This chapter argues for a keenly felt decline, perceived by contemporaries and corroborated by the best available quantitative evidence, in the dominant sector of Perpignan’s economy, namely, cloth manufacturing. This chapter also argues for a surprising similarity in the Nou regiment’s and the Nova forma’s economic policies. Notwithstanding their different social profiles, both regimes sought to revive production and prosperity through traditional protectionism and anti-fraud regulation. This chapter argues that the surprising similarities in the regimes’ economic policies, and their inability to match the inventiveness displayed in matters of municipal government, reflect the power of cultural assumptions so deeply rooted that the desire for newness could not prevail against them: that production and prosperity were functions of honour; and that the greatest source of dishonour was fraud, which the town aspired to stamp out.

This chapter analyses Latin American trade policy trends from post-2008 to 2018 and offers in-depth case studies of Brazil and Mexico. At both aggregate and more detailed levels of analysis we document the significant rise in protectionism, and non-tariff measures (NTMs) in particular, in the decade following the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. We focus on the preferential trade agreements (PTAs) that govern Mexico’s trade under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and Brazil’s trade in the context of the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR). We report two main findings regarding Latin American trade and commercial policy trends in the 21st century. First, PTAs – long considered as key trade and investment-creating conduits – are now emerging as venues within which NTMs (e.g., non-transparent interventions, import bans, licensing requirements, controls on safety standards) are simultaneously increasing. That is, members within the same scheme are deploying NTMs against each other. The good news is that membership in these PTAs has mitigated some intra-bloc protectionism, albeit against a backdrop of rising NTMs within these PTAs, nonetheless. Second, the rapid trade and investment integration of China into Latin America markets since 2002 has directly shaped trade policy patterns and responses in this region. In the end, neither Brazil nor Mexico has risen to the occasion in terms of generating a pro-growth trade strategy that delivers compelling distributional and productive returns. Some of these shortcomings are due to path dependence within each PTA, as policymakers in both countries have failed to update approaches that have clearly failed to deliver over time. Outside of these PTAs, the stale macroeconomic response of each country to dynamic and competitive challenges emanating from the global economy risks an extenuation of long-term patterns of political and economic underperformance.

“Where are you really from?” This chapter takes a closer look at corporate nationality, the key element in geopolitical risk. Notwithstanding the challenges in defining a global company’s nationality, a firm’s country of origin will shape how it is treated in global markets. The chapter examines how corporate nationality shapes the manner in which companies compete, the resources they have access to, and whether it will be a source of advantage or disadvantage in global operations. For managers, an important question is whether they can shape others’ perceptions of their company’s nationality. Different approaches including masking, localization, transfer of control rights, and partnerships with foreign firms are discussed.

Accounts concerning the world trading system usually start the debate from the negotiation of the GATT. Trade integration before the First World War, though, had been quite remarkable, and the study of this era enriches our understanding of modern institutions in at least two ways. First, a number of GATT provisions had already been shaped during discussions following the advent of the League of Nations. Second, trade integration before the First World War did not manage to put a brake on belligerent behaviour, putting to rest the old Montesquieuan idea of doux commerce. Recent developments (like the invasion of Ukraine by Russia) can be analysed in this context, so that the world trading community can better grasp the limits of trade integration, and its impact on international relations.

Introduces the economic crisis that the US is currently experiencing and the reasons why industrial policy is the right solution to it.

Summarizes the industrial policies of the US from 1750 to 1865, especially the fact that the US was founded as a protectionist nation with active industrial policies.

Chapter 1 is the introduction to the book. The chapter provides the background to the problem. The anti-dumping investigations are conducted with complicated procedural rules so that exporters cannot cooperate with the investigating authorities. Investigating authorities tend to inflate anti-dumping duties and use anti-dumping for protectionist purposes taking advantage of the non-cooperation. In this context, research questions are listed in connection to the main problem. The scope of the research is also set in Chapter 1.

Article 34 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provides that measures equivalent to a quantitative restriction shall be prohibited. The case law of the European Court of Justice interpreting this has addressed product standards, selling arrangements and all other kinds of national measures that might tend to hinder trade or affect consumer behaviour and thereby restrict imports. Relying on judge-made ideas such as mutual recognition and mandatory requirements, the Court has put the informed consumer at the heart of the market, at the expense of the paternalistic state. On the other hand, it recognises the need to restrict free movement where legitimate public interests are at stake, with the proportionality of such restrictive measures being the main question in most cases.

Doctrine became increasingly less important, giving way to the second form of the conservative quest: the turn to culture as the defining feature of Christianity. The third chapter traces the development of postliberalism through the lens of mainline Protestantism’s interest in the authority and interpretation of scripture, beginning with biblical theology and concluding with the postliberal project of theological interpretation of scripture. This development explains how the norms of Christianity became understood as cultural norms, thus paving the way for orthodoxy becoming a form of culture war.

This chapter analyses macroeconomic policy, with a focus on monetary policy, relating it to the performance of the economy in Turkey in the Great Depression. The Depression was transmitted to Turkey primarily through a sharp decline in agricultural commodity prices. In response, the government adopted strongly protectionist measures starting in 1929 and pursued import-substituting industrialization. In contrast, Turkey’s macroeconomic policy was cautious. Fiscal policy adhered to the principle of balanced budgets. The policies of the new central bank, established in 1930, were similarly restrained: as a result, the monetary base increased very little before 1938. While this restraint resulted in some appreciation of the currency, Turkey’s economy did better than most others around the Eastern Mediterranean. The chapter argues this performance was primarily due to strong protectionism, which paid benefits in the short run, and recovery in the agricultural sector.

The relationship between capitalism and nationalism escapes easy generalization – hardly surprising given the many conceptions of nationalism, and the many stages and varieties of capitalism. Let us begin, then, with some ideal-typical definitions.

Nationalism is a form of politicized ethnicity in which a self-identified cultural group seeks to create or succeeds in creating a nation-state of its own. It also refers to ideological goals and tangible policies oriented to the preservation or strengthening of the nation-state.

There are as many ways of defining capitalism as there are of nationalism. For our purposes, this definition is most useful. Capitalism is a political-economic system in which property rights are legally protected by the state, in which prices are set primarily by supply and demand in a market composed of profit-seeking entrepreneurs or companies, usually (but not always) employing free wage labor.

When Britain unilaterally embraced free trade in 1846, proponents at home and abroad widely assumed that the rest of the industrializing world would soon follow suit. But Britain’s economic cosmopolitan trump card received an unanticipated countermove from its competitors; one rival after another instead turned to economic nationalism in order to foster their infant industries at home and to expand their closed colonial markets abroad. Even Britain’s own settler colonies abandoned free trade by the turn of the century. Economic nationalism, not free trade, became the driving political economic force underpinning the century of imperial expansion from the mid-nineteenth century to the Second World War.

British free traders sought to curb this economic nationalist turn, and the United States, Britain’s resource-rich former colony, seemingly contained the most fruitful soil for free trade’s mid-nineteenth-century transplantation. All the early omens appeared promising.

The extent to which Chinese goods exports faced unilateral trade policy changes taken by other WTO members is documented here and decomposed between those policy changes that specifically target China and those that do not. Chinese goods exposure to measures taken by the European Union, the United States, China’s regional partners, and those taken worldwide are also contrasted, in terms of scale, discriminatory or liberalising treatment, as well as timing. The degree to which China’s WTO membership protected its goods exports from worse competitive conditions since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis is assessed and found wanting.

The extent to which Chinese goods exports faced unilateral trade policy changes taken by other WTO members is documented here and decomposed between those policy changes that specifically target China and those that do not. Chinese goods exposure to measures taken by the European Union, the United States, China’s regional partners, and those taken worldwide are also contrasted, in terms of scale, discriminatory or liberalising treatment, as well as timing. The degree to which China’s WTO membership protected its goods exports from worse competitive conditions since the onset of the Global Financial Crisis is assessed and found wanting.