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Guerre, commerce, guerre commerciale : l'économie politique des échanges franco-anglais réexaminée

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

John Vincent Nye
John Vincent Nye*
Affiliation:
Washington University, St. Louis
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Extract

Au cours des deux dernières décennies, nos idées sur l'histoire économique moderne de la France et de l'Angleterre ont fait l'objet d'un sérieux réexamen. Les travaux concernant le poids de la fiscalité de part et d'autre de la Manche (Mathias et O'Brien, 1976 ; O'Brien, 1988) ont modifié nos vues sur la place relative de l'État dans les deux pays à la fin du XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle. Sans nécessairement rectifier les thèses bien connues d'Heckscher sur le caractère plus interventionniste et mercantiliste des gouvernements français en comparaison de leurs homologues britanniques, des recherches récentes ont infirmé les idées reçues sur l'importance de l'Etat et le poids moyen de la fiscalité dans les deux nations. On'garde toutefois l'habitude d'opposer fortement les deux pays au XIXe siècle. Ainsi persiste-t-on à voir dans l'Angleterre l'État libéral et quasiment minimal par excellence, doté d'un gouvernement discret, pratiquant le laissez-faire à l'intérieur et le libre-échange à l'extérieur, tandis que la France aurait eu une économie arriérée et, sous la férule d'un gouvernement dirigiste, se serait fermée aux échanges. Pourquoi une telle différence? Comment concilier ces points de vue contradictoires et comment comprendre leur origine ? Il est d'autant plus problématique de rapprocher ces interprétations que des travaux révisionnistes en histoire économique ont largement contribué à détruire l'image d'un échec économique de la France au XIVe siècle.

Summary

Summary

Recent research indicates that conventional wisdom regarding the relative openness of British and French trade policy in the nineteenth century has been mistaken. Average French tariff levels were substantially below those of Great Britain till the 1870s, and traditional work has been too narrowly focused on trade in manufacturing to the exclusion of agriculture and wine. This essay re examines our historical understanding of British and French economic development in the light of these findings and seeks to integrate this work with the revisionist literature on the relative sizes of the eighteenth century British and French states. We see how trade and tax policy in the first half of the nineteenth century was inevitably stamped by the course of political developments from the time of Louis XIV to the end of the Napoleonic Wars and how in Britain, the nature of her fiscal structure was affected by the trade wars engaged in with France. We speculate on how misinterpretation of commercial history has distorted our views of the two countries and we further speculate on how political and economic developments in the eighteenth century that had hitherto been treated as separate interacted to shape and influence the political economy of the nineteenth century.

Type
Commerce, Marché, Monnaie
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , June 1992 , pp. 613 - 632
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 1992

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