President Trump has deployed tariffs as a policy tool in a way that no other modern president has. Are there any historical precedents or parallels to his actions? How has American agriculture participated in past debates over tariff policy? Is agriculture always a loser in trade wars or might there be some silver linings? This lecture will explore the history of US tariffs and its implications for agricultural producers and consumers.
Douglas Irwin is John French Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which The Economist and Foreign Affairs selected as one of their Best Books of the Year.
He is the author of Free Trade Under Fire (Princeton University Press, fifth edition 2020), Trade Policy Disaster: Lessons from the 1930s (MIT Press, 2012), Peddling Protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton University Press, 2011), Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996), and many articles on trade policy and economic history in books and professional journals.
He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was president of the Economic History Association (2023-24). He worked on trade and agriculture policy while on the staff of President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. Before joining Dartmouth, Irwin taught at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.
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