510
ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.
rested on the determination to keep British
political
and military influ–
ence, not British exports or investment, out of the hemisphere.
1
The fervency of his vision leads Professor Williams not only to
exaggerate his points but to fill his text with implicit moral overtones
and undertones. To put it briefly, he seems to regard the quest for
overseas markets -i.e., foreign trade - as a wicked thing
per se.
Every
time he can f.ind anyone in the nineteenth century expressing an interest
in
e~ports
he quotes the statement against him as if it were an inadvertent
confession of a desire to. murder his mother. This viewpoint raises
in–
teresting questions, with none of which Professor Williams chooses to
deal.
For one thing, what is so evil abo.ut the desire to sell or exchange
domestic products in other countries? For that matter, what is so. evil
about the Open Door - that is, the preference that foreign trading
should take place on an equal basis among nations?
If
Professor Wil–
liams thinks that low tariffs, multilateral trading relations and so on
are wicked, what sort of trading pattern does he advocate? Bilateral
relations? Managed trade? Autarky? How indeed does he suppose that
American economic development would have taken place without for–
eign trade? As Douglass C. North points out in
The Economic Growth
of the United States, 1790-1860:
"There are few exceptions to the es–
sential initiating role of a successful export sector in the early stages
of accelerated growth of market economies."
His moralistic approach to the problem of foreign trade, in addition,
makes him miss out on the historical context of the American tradition
in overseas commerce. In this connection, it is well to. consider another
book on American expansionism, also published in 1969 -
America and
the Mediterranean World,
1776-1882
by James A. Field, Jr. This book,
which has been widely neglected by the lay press, is a far better, if far
less pretentious,' piece of history than the Williams book; it is also in–
finitely better written and in unusually literate and sardonic prose.
Professor Field makes it clear that the American interest in foreign
trade long predated a general agricultural surplus and was quite separate
from it. Indeed, the forty-five years after the Treaty of Ghent - in short,
Theodore Roosevelt thus stated the issue:
"If
Great Britain can extend
h er territory in South America without remonstrance from us, every other
European power can do the same and in a short time you will see South
America parcelled out as Africa has been. We should then find ourselves
with great powers to the South of us and we should be forced to become
at once a nation with a powerful army and navy with difficulties
and
dangers surrounding us."
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