UNE Business School lecturer Dr Mathew Frith will launch his book, America’s Neglected Protectionist Tradition: The Economics That Forged a Nation (Anthem Press) at 11:00am on Friday 11 September 2026 at Lecture Theatre 2, UNE Business School, and online via Zoom.
The Trump administration has justified its controversial swing to trade protectionism by invoking America’s past. A new book agrees that protectionism helped build an American industrial powerhouse, but argues that the sophistication of the original policy is missing today – largely because the economics profession forgot it existed.
The book reconstructs the economic system of the American Protectionist School, which included Alexander Hamilton, Henry Charles Carey and nearly seventy other economists and statesmen writing from the 1790s into the 20th century. Their ideas were taken up by US presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge, and formed the basis of Republican economic policy for decades. Yet these ideas have vanished so completely from economic discourse that, as Dr Frith writes in his preface, “even mentioning ‘American Protectionism’ in academic circles provokes either blank stares or reflexive dismissal”.
Working through a trove of neglected treatises, pamphlets and journals, Dr Frith found a view of protectionism with far more nuance than the concept is accorded today.
The American Protectionists built their economics on a claim about human beings: that individuals are distinct and are not interchangeable – something Dr Frith says stands in contrast with mainstream economic thinking.
“Their picture of the individual is that there’s a diversity of talents, aptitudes and dispositions among people,” Dr Frith says. “For individuals to exercise their unique talents, you need a diversity of industries for them to go into.”
Protective tariffs secured that diversity of industry. While the best-known version of the argument is the “infant industry” case — sheltering new industries until they can withstand foreign competition — the book shows it was only one of several developed by the American Protectionists. Their deeper aim was a permanently diversified economy that allowed individuals to exercise their unique talents and maximise their individuality. Their case for protection even extended beyond manufacturing to the creation of a home market for agriculture.
Whereas Classical economics located economic growth in capital accumulation, the protectionists located it in invention. Growth came from people exercising their ingenuity and coming up with new ways of manipulating earthly substances into instruments fit for human use. One of the school's writers, John L. Hayes, even used the term “endogenous growth” – growth involving invention and technologic change – about a century before mainstream economists arrived at it. This was one of several ideas, Dr Frith argues, that modern economics went on to rediscover without knowing it had been there before.
Then versus now
There are parallels with the Trump administration’s tariffs, Dr Frith says, and there are differences.
“If you isolate the tariff policy itself, there’s a fair bit of resemblance. One of the criticisms economists make of Trump’s tariffs is that they aren’t strategic. Trump’s tariffs are instead broad-based. But a broad-based tariff is exactly what the nineteenth-century protectionists wanted, because the goal was diversification across the whole economy, not picking winners.”
“The divergence between the early protectionists and Trump lies in their motivations. Trump’s thrust is often neo-mercantilist — extracting geopolitical concessions, fixating on the trade balance. You don’t find that in the nineteenth-century writings. They cared about creating scope for entrepreneurs, a diversity of industries, and letting individuals use their talents.”
On the warnings of a tariff-induced economic catastrophe, Dr Frith is sceptical: prominent economists have predicted recession or depression from the current tariffs. “Most of those predictions haven’t come to fruition.”
The United States, he notes, became the world’s largest economy under protection. An economy dwarfed by British industry at the start of the nineteenth century had surpassed the entire industrial capacity of the British Empire by the early twentieth — and that industrial base, he argues, is what American dominance after World War II was built on.
He also sees the shift outlasting one presidency, pointing to the European Union’s turn to industrial policy in response to Chinese electric vehicle imports: “Protectionism, or at least a much more interventionist approach to trade policy, is going to stick around.”
His challenge is aimed at both sides of the argument: “I don’t think current debate contends with the best arguments for protectionism. Free traders should engage with them too — not pick the low-hanging fruit.”
A neglected trove of thought
Dr Frith began exploring American protectionist thought as an undergraduate. Wanting to understand more about the school’s motivations, he started turning up books, pamphlets and journals that had disappeared from economic discourse.
“I ended up uncovering this vast school of economic thinkers who argued with a remarkable degree of theoretical consistency,” he says. That discovery drove his PhD, and his doctorate, greatly refined and developed, became this book.
“Most PhD students have to incrementally advance their field of knowledge. I stumbled on an area that no-one else had touched for decades, and I also found that far from being dry and irrelevant, that these thinkers spoke directly to our current economic zeitgeist.”
The book draws heavily on the protectionists’ own words — a deliberate defence, Dr Frith writes, against the distortions and “pseudo-references” that have long misrepresented them.
International praise
- “Mathew Frith offers a masterful recovery of the protectionist school of political economy… This book will stand as the authoritative reference on the subject for years to come.” — Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak, Associate Professor of Economics, American University of Paris
- “Frith’s book fills a significant gap in the scholarly literature by offering what is to date the most comprehensive review of the theoretical underpinnings of America’s central contribution to the history of economic thought.” — Christopher W. Calvo, Florida International University
- “This book is essential reading for those who still don’t acknowledge USA’s deep protectionist heritage which has returned with such a force today.” — Lars Magnusson, Emeritus Chair Professor of Economic History, Uppsala University
Publication details
America’s Neglected Protectionist Tradition: The Economics That Forged a Nation by Mathew A. Frith is published by Anthem Press (2026), hardback, ISBN 978-1-83999-926-0, and is also available as an eBook.
