How Britain Turned to Free Trade

1987 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
William D. Grampp

British free trade has been variously attributed to the importuning of business interests, to the advanced state of manufacturing, to politicians acting on improper or unworthy motives, or to imperialism. Professor Grampp examines a critical event in the history of free trade: Parliament's declaration in 1820 that future commercial policy should be guided by that principle. By 1850, all major restrictions had been abolished. The decision of 1820, according to Thomas Tooke, a principal in the event, was made by the Tory Government with the concurrence of the Whig Opposition, both of which had come to believe free trade would increase per capita real income: that is, both acted in what they and others since have understood to be the public interest.

1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. D. Allin

The battle over the Corn Laws was fought out in Great Britain as a domestic issue. But it had nevertheless a great imperial significance. During the mercantilistic régime the colonies had been regarded as a commercial appanage of the mother country. The victory of the free traders opened up a new era in the economic history of the empire. The colonies were released from the irksome restrictions of the Navigation Laws. They acquired the right to frame their own tariffs with a view to their own particular interests. In short, they ceased to be dependent communities and became self-governing states.But the emancipation of the colonies was by no means complete. The home government still claimed the right to control their tariff policies. The colonies were privileged, indeed, to arrange their tariff schedules according to local needs; but it was expected that their tariff systems would conform to the fiscal policy of the mother land. The free traders, no less than the mercantilists, were determined to maintain the fiscal unity of the empire. There was still an imperial commercial policy; its motif only had been changed from protection to free trade. The colonies were still bound to the fiscal apron strings of the mother country; but the strings were no longer so short, nor the knots so tight as they had formerly been.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Shepperd

Abstract Through detailed archival analysis of personal letters, this article examines how the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934 inspired the formation of the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), and influenced Paul Lazarsfeld’s development of two-step flows and media effects research. Buried in federal records, a post-Act Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Pursuant that mandated analysis of educational broadcasting additionally turns out to be the causative reason that Theodor Adorno was brought to America by the Rockefeller Foundation. Crucial to the intellectual history of media and communication theory, Lazarsfeld invited Adorno not only to develop techniques to inform educational music study, but to strategically formulate advocacy language for the media reform movement to help noncommercial media obtain frequency licenses. The limits and pressures exerted by the FCC Pursuant influenced the trajectory of the PRRP research, and consequently, the methodological investments of Communication Studies.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-101
Author(s):  
Dina I. Waked

This article proposes the use of antitrust law to reduce poverty and address inequality. It argues that the antitrust laws are sufficiently malleable to achieve such goals. The current focus of antitrust on the efficiency-only goals does not only lead to increasing inequality further but is also inconsistent with the history of antitrust. This history is presented through the lens of the public interest that emerges into the balance between private property and competition policy. Tracing the public interest at different historical moments, we get to see how it has been broad enough to encompass social welfare concerns. Over time, the public interest concern of antitrust was narrowed to exclusively cover consumer welfare and its allocative efficiency. Once we frame antitrust as public interest law, in its broadest sense, we are empowered to use it to address inequality. A proposal to do so is exposed in this article.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey L. Adams

The regulation of professional groups has often been justified as being in the public interest. In recent decades, policymakers in Anglo-American countries have questioned whether self-regulating professions have truly served the public interest, or whether they have merely acted in their own interests. This paper draws on legislative records and policy reports to explore meanings attached to professional self-regulation and the public interest in Canada by state actors over the past 150 years. The findings point to a shift in the definition of the public interest away from service quality and professional interests, towards efficiency, human rights, consumer choice, and in some contexts business interests. Changing views of the public interest contribute to regulatory change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Janis Teruggi Page

To illustrate the interdisciplinary breadth of public interest communications (PIC), this study explores the societal importance, engagement strategies, and public impact of La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, CA, an internationally known nonprofit organization founded in 1975. It responds to Downes’ (2017) advice on approaching PIC investigation and his call for “research readily informed by those ‘in the field,’” (p. 34), or those engaged in actual social/cultural changes resulting from PIC consciousness. Drawing from past scholarship on practices in community-based social justice organizations and public interest communications, interviews with La Peña’s leaders, the author’s own experiences as one of its founders, and source materials from its documentarian, this study encapsulates La Peña’s 44-year history of serving as a change agent through amplifying marginal voices.


This chapter traces the history of public service television. The history of British public service broadcasting policy in the 20th century is characterized by a series of very deliberate public interventions into what might otherwise have developed as a straightforward commercial marketplace. The creation of the BBC, the launch of an ITV network required to produce public service programming, and the addition of the highly idiosyncratic Channel 4 gave the UK a television ecology animated by quality, breadth of programming and an orientation towards serving the public interest. At each of these three moments, the possibilities of public service television were expanded and British culture enriched as a result. The 1990 Broadcasting Act and the fair wind given to multichannel services may have ended the supremacy of the public service television ideal. However, public service television has survived, through the design of the institutions responsible for it, because of legislative protection, and as a result of its continuing popularity amongst the public.


1977 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 474-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Gantz

On September 22, 1976, the United States and the Government of Peru signed an agreement resolving the nationalization of the Marcona Mining Company’s Peruvian branch. The settlement, the intergovernmental negotiations leading up to it, and the expropriation itself are of more than passing interest. The settlement has been characterized by the U.S. Government as providing, when fully implemented, prompt, adequate, and effective compensation through a package—a combination of cash and long term sales relationship—which represents a relatively beneficial arrangement economically and politically for the Government of Peru. These arrangements were the more remarkable for having been concluded with a leading Third World country that has a long history of nationalization of foreign investment. In light of the frequency of expropriations of American-owned property abroad, and of the fact that in one or more ways such expropriations involve issues of the public interest as well as those of private U.S. companies, the Marcona settlement has implications for the handling of other investment disputes.


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