“This is, unfortunately, a long book.” These are not my words. They are the author's. And with such an inauspicious opening, the reader cannot help but wonder what (dis)pleasures are in store. Thankfully, Robert Pahre has not just written a long book, but one which offers numerous insights on the trading system of both the nineteenth century and the present day.

The book, although partitioned in twelve chapters, is really divided into three sections which constitute related themes in domestic political support, bilateral trade cooperation, and multilateral norms. The basic theme is that “domestic politics can provide the foundation for a stable international trade regime” (p. 4) through its interaction with, first, domestic constituencies and, second, the policy choices of other states (assumed to be subject to many of the same political constraints).

The first step is to lay out a theory of political support which represents a very parsimonious calculus for the choices of political leaders. Basically, these leaders attempt to maximize support at home, and one of the tools at their disposal is commercial policy which can be used to reward supportersand, presumably, punish detractorsthrough the distribution of the gains from trade. The remaining chapters in this first section delineate the degree to which revenue concerns drove commercial policy in the long nineteenth century (they did not) and the degree to which democracy was automatically associated with free trade (it was not).

The second section draws from the theory laid out above to consider the interactions of an individual nation's commercial policy in the light of exogenous changes in the terms of trade and their attendant effects on another nation's commercial policy. His contention is that protectionism abroad generates liberalization at home; that is, changes in the terms of and gains from trade dominate considerations of retaliation. Thus, Pahre is making a significant departure from the traditional literature on not only endogenous protection (which only considers variation across sectors within a country and which would presume no relationship between domestic and foreign commercial policy), but also hegemonic stability (which invokes the need of a single nation's dominance or leadership in driving international cooperation).

The final section starts from the premise that the conditions that help determine a nation's autonomous tariff policy are oftentimes the same set of variables which facilitate cooperation among nations. It also attempts to build on the insights previously developed on bilateral cooperation to generate a theory of multilateral cooperation. This, of course, is highly pertinent in light of the development and wide diffusion of most-favored-nation (MFN) treaties in the nineteenth century. He finds that while MFNs insulate cooperation from changes in economic and political conditions, they may also make cooperation more difficult and trade treaty concessions less stringent.

As the preceding hopefully illustrates, these sections are almost self-standing units. In fact, any of these previously discussed sections could be picked up independently by a reader. This independence seems to reflect that many of the chapters have appeared previously in journals, and though the book is not a random sampling of previous works, it could do with a little tightening around the edges, especially in light of the book's length. Another weakness of the work is in the empirics, specifically the data. Tariff policy and openness are measured by variables which may be familiar to readers of this or other journals in economic history. And although familiar, this does not mean they are either suitable or attractive. Basically, the standard metric for the restrictiveness of commercial policy is the ratio of customs revenue to the declared value of imports, and the standard metric for the degree of economic openness is the ratio of (the declared value of) imports to GDP. Now, having used both of these variables myself in the past, it seems more than a little duplicitous to take Pahre to task here. At the same time, so much of the thrust of the book's claims (47 separate propositions subdivided into hypotheses, corollaries, findings, and results) is dependent upon the accurate measure of these two variablesand that of commercial policy, especiallythat this reader is left wondering about the validity of the empirical tests in the light of chronically low observation counts and measurement error problems. This somewhat cavalier approach to data is also reflected in the author's presumed unfamiliarity with the trove of output and terms of trade data generated in the past few years by the likes of Angus Maddison and Jeffrey Williamson, respectively.

Finally, Pahre sets out another goal late in the conclusion: the establishment of a “new political history” on par with the “new economic history” revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.

Citing his work as well as that of Doug Irwin, Timothy McKeown, and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, he sees the time as being ripe for a regrounding of political history in the bedrock of formal theory and econometric inquiry. Not knowing how receptive the rest of the political science profession will be to this clarion call, I offer the author the best of luck and praise for producing what will hopefully be one of the definitive works in the new genre.