My good friend Harry Pollard may have overstated his case that "Trade (referring to free trade) has been normal throughout the history of Man". Maybe it should have been, but for better or worse, international exchange controls and trade monopolies have been more normal, I believe. A. Smith called it "mercantilism". Before that there were taxes and controls between provinces and principalities and city-states. Turgot pioneered in getting them lowered or removed in France, and his thinking helped inspire the U.S. Founding Fathers to put the commerce clause in our Constitution. Within city-states there were controls over trade with their contado's or hinterlands. Unilateral free trade was a British innovation, 1846-1914 approximately, briefly copied by Prussia and France. As an earlier contributor (Neill?) to this HES service noted, it is unusual to be able to generalize from here and now to everywhere and forever. Mason Gaffney