Alexander Hamilton Utilized Britain’s Mercantile-Protectionism to Release an Epochal Non-Linear National Boon against the Workshop of the World: Great Britain

Emir Phillips

Journal of Economic Issues, 2025, vol. 59, issue 3, 940-956

Abstract: The founding mercantile institutions implanted within the U.S. body politic by Alexander Hamilton were a profound impetus toward economic development even unto today. The revolution in economic thinking brought about by Adam Smith, David Hume, and David Ricardo in sweeping away the institutional impact of Alexander Hamilton (Secretary to the Treasury), and subsequently Abraham Lincoln, is greatly exaggerated. Today’s leading industrial nations, regardless of their initial factor proportions (land, labor and capital), achieved their head starts by interfering with “free” trade.At the national inception, a mercantile program for developing the domestic manufacturing industry was presented to Congress by Hamilton in his Report on Manufactures. The Whig assessment of technological innovation concluded that protective tariffs were a precondition for securing an Economy of High Wages through a feedback principle by State promotion of investment in capital goods and skilled labor. This political philosophy was later to be further delineated by economists Daniel Raymond and Henry Charles Carey under “The American System,” and politically became the core policies of the Whig Party of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster; subsequently inherited and fully implemented by the Republican Party from Lincoln onwards until at least 1932. But to be clear, this socio-economic process began via the economic-nationalist ideas of Hamilton, and particularly his Congressional Report on Manufactures.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2025.2533722

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