Politics and Trade Cooperation in the Nineteenth Century

Robert Pahre is Professor of Political Science and Director of the European Union Center at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Rochester. Professor Pahre is the author of Leading Questions: How Hegemony Affects the International Political Economy (1999); editor of Democratic Foreign Policy Making: Problems of Divided Government (2006); coauthor with Fiona McGillivray, Iain McLean, and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey of International Trade and Political Institutions: Instituting Trade in the Long Nineteenth Century (2001); and, with Mattei Dogan, coauthor of Creative Marginality: Innovation at the Intersection of Social Sciences (1990). His research has appeared in academic journals in political science, sociology, library science, linguistics, and the philosophy of science.

• Part I. Cooperation and Variation: 1. International cooperation across time and space; Part II. Domestic Politics and Trade Policy: 2. Conceptualizing and measuring trade policy; 3. A political support theory of trade policy; 4. State capacity, fiscal concerns, and the tariff; 5. Political institutions and tariffs; Part III. Political Support and Trade Cooperation: 6. The trade agreements database; 7. Political support and trade treaties; 8. Variation in trade cooperation; 9. Ratification and trade treaties; Part IV. Norms and Cooperation: 10. The most-favored-nation norm; 11. The spread of the trade treaty network; 12. Clustering negotiations in time; Part V. Conclusions: 13. Explaining trade cooperation in 1815–1914.

Review of the hardback: 'While political scientists and other scholars have studied the post-World War II trade regime in detail, we still know little about the basis of trade cooperation in the past. In this important volume, Robert Pahre sheds new and fascinating light on the nineteenth century trading system. His work will be of great interest to scholars working in many fields and disciplines.' Douglas A. Irwin, Dartmouth College