Book Review: American Foreign Trade as Promoted by the Webb-Pomerene and Edge Acts

Abstract

This book deserves hearty commendation. Treating as it does of the economic history of trade combinations and their regulation by law, it exemplifies the combination of economic and legal points of view in making clear the development of "big business" in the modem world. It is not technically a lawyer's book, yet the lawyer dealing with the subject of restraint of trade and particularly with the export trade law (the Webb-Pomerene Act of 1918) and the foreign trade financing law (the Edge Act of 1919)-the goal of the discussion in the earlier parts of the book-will find almost indispensable the economic background which will make the statutes and their evolution intelligible. It is this economic background, illuminated by the statutory and judicial treatment of trade combinations, which the book primarily emphasizes. The authors, experts in the Government service and evidently enthusiasts in their work, as well as teachers in the new Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, have had available the results of the exhaustive studies and investigations of the Federal Trade Commission, in some of which they participated. The result is a historical survey of trade combinations and governmental regulation of restraints of trade and methods of unfair competition, beginning with the common law, and developed principally by the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, the Clayton Act, and the Federal Trade Commission Act, leading up to an analysis of the Webb-Pomerene Act and the Edge Act The book was doubtless finished too soon to include the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921, the latest of the important series of statutes for the governmental control of business.