TY  - JOUR
AU  - Irwin,Douglas A.
AU  - Temin,Peter
TI  - The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7825
PY  - 2000
Y2  - August 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7825
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7825.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Douglas A. Irwin
Department of Economics
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH  03755
Tel: 603/646-2942
Fax: 603/646-2122
E-Mail: douglas.irwin@dartmouth.edu

Peter Temin
Department of Economics
MIT, Room E52-271A
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-3126
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: ptemin@mit.edu
AB  - Recent research has suggested that the antebellum U.S. cotton textile industry would have been wiped out had it not received tariff protection.  We reaffirm Taussig's judgment that the U.S. cotton textile industry was largely independent of the tariff by the 1830s.  American and British producers specialized in quite different types of textile products that were poor substitutes for one another.  The Walker tariff of 1846, for example, reduced the duties on cotton textiles from nearly 70 percent to 25 percent and imports soared as a result, but there was little change in domestic production.  Using data from 1826 to 1860, we estimate the responsiveness of domestic production to fluctuations in import prices and conclude that the industry could have survived even if the tariff had been completely eliminated.
ER  -