At his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump took a moment to right what he considers to be an historical wrong. The Alaska mountain, officially rechristened as Mount Denali by the Obama administration a decade ago, would be re-dubbed Mount McKinley in honour of William McKinley, the 25th President.

The memory of McKinley has become something of a touchstone in the new president’s second term. At both his inauguration and at the so-called Liberation Day press conference in the White House Rose Garden, Trump waxed lyrical about his predecessor’s protectionist trade policy. For someone with Trump’s worldview, in as much as that worldview can be understood, McKinley seems to offer a lot. Trump clearly sees himself as following in the style of the president he has called ‘a great businessman’ who ‘made the country very rich through tariffs’. The fact that McKinley oversaw an expansion of the size of the territory controlled by the United States, seizing the Philippines from Spain after the Spanish-American War, no doubt adds to his appeal to the current president.

The fact that Trump is so keen to draw an historical precedent from American history for his hardline approach to trade policy is unsurprising. It is, after all, a radical break from recent decades. Even allowing for the on-again, off-again approach that has, in just a few short weeks, seen tariff levels ramped up and cut back on different countries, and exemptions and temporary delays put in place, it represents a fundamental break with the approach taken by the United States over most of the last century.

A 10 per cent general tariff on all imports coupled with tariffs of almost 150 per cent on most Chinese imports as well as a 25 per cent tax on imports of cars and steel add up to an average tariff level of around 20 to 25 per cent. The exact number is tricky to calculate, as it rather depends on how quickly imports from China drop. The so-called ‘reciprocal tariffs’ – of 20 per cent on goods from the European Union, 26 per cent on those from Japan, 90 per cent on those from Vietnam and so forth – are currently delayed but officially due to come into force in the next three months. Even if they are negotiated away before implementation, the current level of upwards of 20 per cent is an enormous increase on the 2.5 per cent level of 2024. US tariffs are now, on aggregate, at their highest level since at least the 1920s. Indeed, in both absolute and proportional terms, the tariff hikes of 2025 so far are a much bigger deal than the 1890 McKinley tariffs, introduced while McKinley was still in Congress and before his presidency, to which Trump often points.

While Trump regularly compares his own approach to tariffs to those of the president at the turn of the 20th century, the better parallel is to be found at around the same time but across the Atlantic. What the world is seeing in 2025 is a country previously at the centre of a closely integrated global economy turning its back on free trade and embracing protectionism. The McKinley era, in the United States at least, is a poor comparison. From Alexander Hamilton onwards, tariffs played a central role in American economic history, both as a raiser of revenue and, in theory, as a form of protection for infant industries. And while modern economic historians tend to believe that such tariffs led to slower, rather than faster, industrialisation, they were an accepted and usual part of America’s economic framework from the beginning. McKinley may have hiked them higher, but this was not a radical break.

The best historical precedent for the second Trump presidency’s protectionist turn is the movement for what was called ‘tariff reform’ in Edwardian Britain. While Britain’s nascent tariff reformers ultimately lost out, the arguments and logic deployed to make their case look eerily like those deployed by Donald Trump on the campaign trail.

Economic historians have long noted that the era of globalisation that began in the late 1970s and 1980s and perhaps reached its peak just before the financial crisis of 2007-09 was the modern world’s second great act of economic integration. The first flourished from the 1870s until 1914.

Writing about what was already a lost world in 1919, John Maynard Keynes remarked how:

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.

This was not, at least for a man of Keynes’s social class, too much of an exaggeration. Global trade, by 1914, was running at the kind of levels that would not be matched again until the 1980s. In the 1840s around five per cent of global GDP, or total world output, moved across borders. By 1914 that had almost tripled to 14 per cent. Gross border lending and investment, much of it directed from London, rose from around seven per cent of the value of the world output up to 20 per cent over the same period. Migration, too, rose to previously unsurpassed levels – notably, in something Trump often chooses to ignore, in the form of poorer European economic migrants crossing the Atlantic to find new opportunities in McKinley’s America. People, goods and capital were all on the move, much like today.

And, also like today, much of this was driven by rapid technological change. Atlantic crossing-times shine a light on the pace of development. By the early 1800s, a sailing vessel could reasonably – winds depending – hope on making a transatlantic voyage in around four to six weeks. By the 1840s, new steam-powered vessels had sliced that down to just two weeks. But progress continued to race forward. Voyage times by the 1880s were around one week and the Titanic was expected to make its ill-fated first transatlantic journey in just under six days in 1911.

If anything, progress in terms of land transport was even faster. Around 125,000 miles worth of rail track had been laid globally by 1870, but that expanded to 400,000 miles by 1900 and over 600,000 miles by 1914.

Communication times fell even faster than travel times. The transatlantic submarine cable of 1866 cut the time required to get news from New York to London from around one week to a matter of minutes. India was connected to the network by 1870 and Australia by 1872.

In effect, the world seemed to be becoming smaller. The ‘annihilation of distance’, as one historian has put it, was ‘a late Victorian cliché’.

Britain’s economy sat at the centre of this global system. London was the centre of global finance and insurance. The British merchant marine dominated global shipping. British goods, especially textiles, could be found on every continent. The world’s first industrial country, which had embraced free trade since the 1840s, was the world’s leading economic power.

By 1900, that position seemed to be under threat. In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, formerly a leading Liberal and now a regular feature of Conservative cabinets, resigned his ministerial post in order to launch a campaign for the introduction of tariffs.

The campaign for tariffs came at a time when Britain might still be a world-leading economy, at the centre of the global trading and financial systems, but also when that lead seemed to be slipping.

The kind of economic statistics that policymakers now take for granted mostly did not exist at the turn of the century. Indeed, the very notion of ‘the economy’, the idea of total economic output, usually measured nowadays by GDP, is something of an anachronism, but there was definitely a sense in the air around 1900 that something had changed. While the abstract concept of GDP was still several decades away, more tangible measures of economic vitality were giving grounds for concern. While few believed that Britain’s economy was in trouble in absolute terms, its relative position in the global pecking order seemed to be under threat.

Take, as an example, steel production – then as now seen as a foundational good for industry. In 1870 Britain had produced around 6.7 million tons of steel; by 1913 that had risen to 10.4 million. Good progress by any measure, but over the same period steel production in the United States grew from 1.7 million tons to 31.5 million. Across the North Sea, German steel output went from 1.6 million tons to 19.3 million. Britain had moved from being the world leader to distinctly second rate.

Export performance, the usual contemporary measure of economic vitality, was also strong in absolute terms with British exports growing by 23 per cent between 1880 and 1900. However, over the same period German exports grew by 63 per cent. The risk of Britain losing its pre-eminent international economic position was widely discussed during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Commenting on ‘poor’ export performance in 1910, The Times noted ‘some apprehension at our future prosperity as a manufacturing state’.

The problem, according to Chamberlain and his supporters, was unfair competition. While the United Kingdom strove onwards with a free-trading approach, its major competitors protected their industries behind tariff walls and were happy to sell their wares in Britain while keeping out British goods. Chamberlain, much like Trump now, had something of a blind spot when it came to services – an area in which Britain, like the United States today, remained globally dominant.

Chamberlain, in turning towards rejecting free trade, was not just breaking a multi-decade political consensus among Britain’s political elite, but also challenging conventional British economic wisdom. In this he was not alone. A school of so-called National Economists had, ever since the 1880s, been questioning the wisdom of Adam Smith’s late 18th-century attack on mercantilist thinking and his embrace of free trade. In 1892, William Cunningham wrote that the English mercantilists of Smith’s day ‘were considering how the power of this country might be promoted relatively to other nations. The object of their system was not absolute progress anywhere but relative superiority to their neighbours’. Here, too, then is another Trump parallel, a view of the economy in which what matters is not the absolute gain to any country from trade, but the gain relative to other countries.

While the imposition of tariffs can be thought of in straightforward economic terms, Chamberlain’s push for protection was always about more than financial variables. Like Trump more than century later, the real drivers were to be found in domestic politics and international geopolitics.

Take domestic politics first. Indeed, the leading historian of the Conservative Party in this period long argued that tariff reform was best understood through the medium of domestic politics. Chamberlain himself occupied an unusual position, once on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, he had broken with his old party over the issue of Home Rule for Ireland and now found himself sitting with the Tories. As the vote was expanded to more working-class men, the major parties increasingly realised that they needed a viable electoral offer to poorer Britons. The politics of social reform rose up the agenda. To Chamberlain, tariffs appeared to offer a road to a programme that could unite the interests of both industrialists – who would be offered protection from imports – with the urban working class, who would be offered new social programmes funded by tariff revenues and benefit from less overseas competition. Much like Trump at his Rose Garden tariff announcement, where the president was joined on stage by auto workers, Chamberlain would regularly campaign among the factory workers of the West Midlands.

Sitting behind the economics, and the potentially electorally helpful domestic politics, was the geopolitics – a geopolitics of fear. As Chamberlain himself put it in in 1902, quoting the historian JR Seeley: ‘The weary Titan staggers under the too vast orb of its fate. We have borne the burden for many years.’

The British Empire in 1902 was larger than it had ever been. British economic output was higher than it had ever been, too. Objectively, the country was richer than at any point in its history, yet its economic lead over rivals was clearly slipping, just at a time when the world itself seemed to becoming smaller and more inter-connected.

Chamberlain drew inspiration from, and in turn inspired, many of the thinkers who met at the Compatriots Club, a turn-of-the-century discussion club for British imperial thinkers. Halford Mackinder, a Compatriots member, in his 1904 lecture ‘The Geographic Pivot of History’ gave the best summing up of this viewpoint. The world was now a ‘closed system’ in which any gain for one power would come at the cost of another. The rapid connection of the great land masses by rail had ended ‘the Colombian epoch’ in which sea powers had been able to both strategically and commercially dominate the land powers. The past may have belonged to maritime trading peoples such as the Dutch and, after them, the British, but the future would be dominated by the great, economically closed land powers: Russia, Germany and the United States.

The appeal of tariff reform, to this group, was not so much the economic upsides, nor even the domestic political implications – instead tariffs were seen as way of binding the British Empire into a closed economic system capable of competing on equal terms with America or Russia.

At heart the programme was driven by a pessimistic view of Britain’s place in a globalised world, one in which rapid changes in transport and communications technology were perceived to have changed the fundamental order in both economics and politics.

This tangled, interweaved web of external threat perception, muddled economics and domestic coalition building failed in Britain. At the 1906 General Election the Liberals scored a landslide victory campaigning on the basis of free trade. Protection was associated with the ‘dear loaf’ as tariffs on grains would make the workers staple of bread pricier. It would be left to Joe’s son, Neville, to see the fruition of his dreams of imperial tariffs in the 1930s.

To any student of Joe Chamberlain’s failed tariff crusade, contemporary America looks similar. The heady combination of an agenda which can appeal to blue-collar workers in the rust belt while also being sold as a necessary national security policy directed against China is familiar. As is the underpinning focus on relative economic performance over absolute.

At heart, like the British attempt 120 years earlier, the protectionist turn in the United States is fundamentally driven by a perception of threat, by a belief that an economic model that has worked for decades is no longer fit for purpose in a world where rivals are stronger.

America’s position in the global economy is not what is was just a few decades ago. But talk of relative economic decline misses the strong absolute gains made. For all Donald Trump’s rhetoric, the country is richer than ever. Indeed, over the last 15 or so years it has outgrown almost every other rich country. His policy turn puts all of that at risk.