From Conflict to Coalition
Profit-Sharing Institutions and the Political Economy of Trade

This book explores the role of class conflict in the history of international trade, as well as contemporary globalization.

Adam Dean (Author)

9781316619735, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 January 2018

240 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.6 cm, 0.4 kg

'In an era when globalization is under assault from the Left and Right across the developed world, Adam Dean presents a provocative new argument about the politics of trade protection. Exploiting firm-level heterogeneity in what he calls profit-sharing institutions, Dean persuasively shows that workers support protection only when they share in the rents created by trade barriers. This is a tremendous book of history with great contemporary relevance.' David A. Lake, Jerri-Ann and Gary E. Jacobs Professor of Social Sciences, University of California, San Diego

International trade often inspires intense conflict between workers and their employers. In this book, Adam Dean studies the conditions under which labor and capital collaborate in support of the same trade policies. Dean argues that capital-labor agreement on trade policy depends on the presence of 'profit-sharing institutions'. He tests this theory through case studies from the United States, Britain, and Argentina in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; they offer a revisionist history placing class conflict at the center of the political economy of trade. Analysis of data from more than one hundred countries from 1986 to 2002 demonstrates that the field's conventional wisdom systematically exaggerates the benefits that workers receive from trade policy reforms. From Conflict to Coalition boldly explains why labor is neither an automatic beneficiary nor an automatic ally of capital when it comes to trade policy and distributional conflict.

1. Introduction
2. A theory of profit-sharing institutions
3. Evidence and research design
4. The gilded wage
5. Liberalized by labor
6. Trade politics in Britain and Argentina
7. Power over profits
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], International trade [KCLT], Political activism [JPW], Comparative politics [JPB]