Should-Read: Alan de Bromhead et al.: When Britain turned inward

Should-Read: Alan de Bromhead et al.: When Britain turned inward: “[To what] extent… [was] trade policy… responsible…

…for the shift towards intra-imperial trade in the interwar period[?] Both tariffs and quotas increased the Empire’s share of British trade, suggesting that trade policy mattered more for interwar trade patterns than the cliometric literature has suggested…. If trade policy had remained frozen at its 1930 level, the Empire would have accounted for between 30% (γ = 2) and 32% (γ = 1) of UK imports in 1935, whereas in fact it accounted for 39%…. There are substantial advantages to using disaggregated data, and to looking at what trade blocs do, as opposed to using aggregate data and simply looking at whether blocs exist or not. Historically, the paper suggests that interwar trade policy mattered more for trade patterns than the cliometric literature has suggested. It certainly mattered a lot in the British case; whether what was true for the UK was also true elsewhere is a question that we hope to address in future research.