Hamilton's Report on Manufactures

The Report on the Subject of Manufactures, delivered by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to Congress in December 1791, is the founding document of American industrial policy and one of the most consequential pieces of economic writing in modern history. Hamilton argued, against the prevailing physiocratic view that agriculture was the proper basis of American prosperity, that the United States required a domestic manufacturing base — and that building one would require active state intervention against the comparative advantage of established British manufacturers. The report's specific prescriptions — tariffs on imported manufactured goods, bounties for domestic production, prohibitions on the export of essential raw materials, infrastructure investment, immigration of skilled workers, patent protection — became the template for American industrial policy through the Civil War and beyond. Chang draws on Hamilton extensively because the report demonstrates, in the founding document of the country that now most aggressively preaches free trade, the explicit