Synopses & Reviews
This is the first modern edition of the nineteenth-century Italian economist Ugo Rabbeno's 'Protezionismo Americano' (1898). Intellectually close to William Cunningham and Luigi Cossa, Rabbeno was among the most advanced economists of his age, drawing on institutional and evolutionary currents in the social sciences long before they became mainstream. His book carefully traces the evolution of American economic policies from their colonial beginnings in relation to the British Empire down through independence and nineteenth-century nation building, unveiling a world of aggressive economic interventions with which contemporary historiography rarely engages. By charting the history of actual policies and their theoretical justifications, Rabbeno's book neatly disproves of the myth that the United States developed through agriculture and laissez-faire. This book offers an empirically grounded alternative vision of America's economic history written by one of the most intriguing yet neglected economists of the late nineteenth century, and one of the very few to propose an evolutionary type of economics before Thorstein Veblen.
Synopsis
This volume offers an historical account of the numerous and different economic policies pursued by the American government from the colonial period to the end of the nineteenth century.
Synopsis
Ugo Rabbeno's 'American Protectionism' documents the different industrial policies and strategies of economic intervention adopted by the American government from the colonial period through the nineteenth century in order to disprove the widely held idea that America developed through agriculture and laissez-faire.
About the Author
Ugo Rabbeno (1863-1897) was a Jewish economist from Reggio Emilia, Italy, who stood out as one of the most prominent exponents of corporative and evolutionary economics of his time.
Francesca L. Viano received her BA from the University of Turin and her PhD from the University of Perugia, Italy. She has held fellowships at Cornell University, at the Luigi Einaudi and Luigi Firpo Foundations in Turin, Italy, and, through the Accademia dei Lincei, the British Academy, and the Royal Society, at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is currently a PhD student at King’s College, University of Cambridge, UK. She has published widely on American history and the history of political economy.
Table of Contents
Introduction; AMERICAN PROTECTIONISM: Essay 1. The English Commercial Policy in the North American Colonies; Essay 2. The Causes of the Commercial Policy of the United States; Essay 3. The Theory of Protectionism in the United States and the Historical Circumstances of its Development; Index