In 1791, Alexander Hamilton, American Secretary of Treasury, submitted to Congress his report on industry in the United States, in which he argued that the US with its industrially backward economy (which was the case back then compared to Europe) needed to protect and support its industries “in their infancy” until they reached a sufficient level of strength to compete with Europe’s manufactures. That might very well be the start of what later came to be known as infant industry protection/promotion, a theory to which many – if not most – successful industrialization stories around the world are linked [7]. Nonetheless, industrial policy goes back even further to the earlier days of the British global empire, when colonial policies discouraged advancing manufacturing enterprises in the colonies. The empire instead preferred to keep its colonies as sources of various raw or lightly processed materials necessary for the manufacturing activities in the British Isles. The idea behind such policy was to keep the colonies dependent on the empire’s metropole in importing finished/manufactured goods, as well as to monopolize manufacturing prowess, and therefore economic dominance. With that, we can say that industrial policy is as old as the industrial revolution.
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