American Protectionism, 1898

This is the first modern edition of the nineteenth-century Italian economist Ugo Rabbenors"s ls"Protezionismo Americanors" (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, Rabbenors"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 Americars"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.