American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

Laura  Phillips Sawyer

Book | 2018

American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

Abstract

American Fair Trade explores the contested political and legal meanings of the term fair trade from the late nineteenth century through the New Deal era. This history of American capitalism argues that business associations partnered with regulators to create codes of fair competition that reshaped both public and private regulatory power.

Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness—not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state’s public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyses how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.

Keywords: Economic Systems; Competition; Policy; Fairness; History; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; United States;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Phillips Sawyer, Laura. American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

The impact of institutional economics in shaping the American regulatory tradition has largely been dismissed as an incoherent attack on the neoclassical economic paradigm. This essay briefly reconstructs the interwar institutionalist movement, exploring the continuities among heterodox thinkers and the implications for public and private institution building. It seeks to reorient the history of U.S. political economy towards a deeper understanding of the public-private regulatory tradition that developed in the 1920s through the influence of the institutionalists and other progressive liberals. It emphasizes institutionalists acting within both public administrative agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce, as well as private research organizations that partnered with business groups and regulatory bodies.

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American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

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