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Exile Economics: If Globalisation Fails

It is the least convincing cliché of the age that ‘globalisation has passed its sell-by date.’ On the contrary,...

Samuel Daliès de la Tour, for example, was not only chief tax collector for the Dauphiné but also a big supplier of timber and iron to the rapidly growing navy, with a nice sideline in textiles and sugar and also shares in the great colonial companies – quite a match for the Rockefellers and Musks of the modern era. This pervasive system deeply affected both the pride and the pockets of the American colonists, just as it impoverished the cattle breeders and linen drapers of Ireland and the weavers of Bengal, who had once enjoyed a 25 per cent share of global trade, but of whom a 19th-century proconsul, Lord William Bentinck, was to write: ‘The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. ‘France was much later in commercial improvements, nor would her trade have been at this time in so prosperous a condition had it not been for the abilities and indefatigable endeavours of the great COLBERT.’ A decade later, in his Report on Manufactures to Congress, Hamilton reiterated George Washington’s instruction that ‘a free people ought to promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly for military, supplies’; everything from gunpowder to uniforms must be made in America.

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