In the Edwardian era, the British Dominions adopted policies of imperial preference amid a period of rising imports from the United States and industrial continental Europe. Hitherto, there has been no econometric assessment of whether these policies diverted the Dominions’ imports towards the Empire, as was intended. This article focuses on New Zealand's initial policy of imperial preference, codified in the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act of 1903. New Zealand's policy was unique insofar as it extended preference to only certain commodities and not others. Using propensity score matching, this study exploits the cross‐commodity variation in the extension of preference and finds that, on the whole, the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act did not divert New Zealand's imports towards the Empire. However, for those few commodities receiving very high absolute margins of preference (20 per cent ad valorem), a statistically significant effect of the preferential policy is found. Altogether, this case study of New Zealand reveals a contrast between the Edwardian system of imperial preference and the trade‐diverting system of imperial preference that resulted from the Ottawa Agreements of the interwar era.

This research note contributes to the debate over whether British exports were elastic to foreign tariffs before the First World War. In doing so, this study is the first to make econometric use of the commodity‐ and country‐disaggregated foreign tariff data that Britain's Board of Trade compiled for the year 1902. Contrary to previous literature, British exports were indeed elastic to foreign tariffs across a range of manufactured commodities, with a conservative estimate of the elasticity being 3.1, which is not low by modern standards. Counterfactually, if foreign countries had emulated Britain's policy of free trade in manufactures in 1902, a partial‐equilibrium estimate is that British exports would have been 57 per cent higher. If the trade‐liberalizing trend of the mid‐nineteenth century persisted into the late‐nineteenth century, then much of the late‐Victorian deceleration of British exports would have been avoided.

Prior to the Import Duties Act of 1932, an assortment of legislation expanded the scope of manufacturing protection in Britain. This article assesses the magnitude of manufacturing protection before the Import Duties Act and finds that, in 1930, 9% of net manufacturing output occurred in a protected industry. In the late 1920s, protected industries exhibited above-average growth in labour productivity. However, protection was disproportionately extended to newer manufacturing industries, which presented greater potential for productivity growth.

This article tests for the presence of a tariff‐growth correlation among the seven tariff‐autonomous colonies of late‐nineteenth‐century Australasia, making use of several colony‐specific macroeconomic series that have only recently become available. Introducing tariffs to a convergence model yields no evidence of an association between tariffs and growth among the Australasian colonies. This finding is unaltered when the tariff variable is replaced by a purposefully constructed proxy variable for the tariff on manufactures specifically. Additionally, this article finds little evidence that tariffs induced an intersectoral adjustment into manufacturing.

Previous scholarship has suggested that British trade was generally unaffected by foreign tariffs during the period from 1870 to 1913. This article focuses specifically on Anglo-American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole intertemporal determinant of Anglo-American trade costs. However, the determinacy of tariffs for Anglo-American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which this article reconstructs. The article concludes by claiming that Anglo-American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth-century Britain.I n the first era of globalization, the largest bilateral flow of trade was between Britain and the US. This article examines Anglo-American trade during the period from 1870 to 1913, the so-called first era of globalization. Specifically, the aim of this article is to identify the determinants of Anglo-American bilateral trade costs, paying special attention to tariffs. Bilateral trade costs are a standardized measure of the difference between the actual and frictionless volumes of bilateral trade. In a recent study, Jacks et al. calculated annual series of bilateral trade costs for a large number of country pairs and then proceeded to estimate the determinants thereof using a gravity model. They found that tariffs were not a statistically significant determinant of the bilateral trade costs of those country pairs that included Britain.1 This finding is consistent with earlier literature claiming that British trade was generally unaffected by foreign tariffs.2