Historians and economists badly need a new history of trade policy in the antebellum United States. Such a volume would presumably have much to say about the connection between industrial development and economic policy, the growth of U.S. nationalism, and the corresponding rise of southern sectionalism. When I first saw the title and description of The Triumph of the Antebellum Free Trade Movement, I thought that book had arrived. Alas, most of William Belko's analysis is devoted to a detailed account of a single free trade convention held in Philadelphia in 1831. If ever a book needed a subtitle, here it is.

For scholars interested in the intellectual history of free trade, Belko's clear summary of the Philadelphia convention will be useful. He details, for example, how northerners and southerners developed their own free trade arguments, with southerners questioning the constitutionality of a protective tariff, while northerners used primarily economic arguments that the tariff resulted in a misallocation of resources. Fearing of being labeled nullifiers, northerners tried to steer clear of constitutional arguments, and for the most part they succeeded in pushing such arguments to the background. These debates are a useful reminder that the case for free trade did not rest on an enduring set of economic principles, but were forged within a particular political and cultural context.

There is a real limit, though, to Belko's approach. Belko's focus on free trade arguments means that we tend to get only one side of the debate, which limits the usefulness of the volume. His emphasis on the Philadelphia free trade convention also limits the sense of change over time. We do not know if free trade arguments in the 1830s, for example, differed from those made in earlier debates over trade policy. The meager references made to the secondary literature—few economists or economic historians are cited—gives the volume a sense of intellectual isolation. Belko is obviously taken with the debates in Philadelphia, but he never makes the case why other scholars should care.

Indeed, it is not clear if the Philadelphia convention really mattered to the ultimate triumph free trade. The delegates produced a lengthy memorial that was sent to Congress in early 1832, along with additional evidence and arguments on behalf of free trade. Robert Hayne of South Carolina and other advocates of free trade cited the memorial on the floor of Congress, but Hayne and others had been making free trade arguments for some time—did the memorial fundamentally change the nature of their arguments? Belko argues that the Philadelphia convention unified intellectual opposition to the tariff, but intellectual unity did not necessarily translate into political unity. The convention's memorial downplayed states’ rights and constitutional arguments against the tariff, but the free trade movement was most successful when the Tariff of 1833 was passed during the South Carolina nullification controversy. Ideas matter in policy debates, but Belko does not provide any evidence that this single exposition of free trade ideas persuaded Congress to lower tariffs. This is a useful book for specialists, but we still await a synthetic treatment of tariffs and economic policy before the Civil War.