Published in 1959: This book is the only detailed study of the origin of the German customs union and its history up to the establishment of the united Reich in 1871. It is based on the author's researches in the Public Record Office and in the archives as Berlin and Vienna and takes full account of the numerous monographs by German Scholars on various aspects of Zollverein history.

Published in 1959 and then in 1968. This book is the only detailed study of the origin of the German customs union and its history up to the establishment of the united Reich in 1871. It is based on the author's researches in the Public Record Office and in the archives as Berlin and Vienna and takes full account of the numerous monographs by German Scholars on various aspects of Zollverein history.

Between 1848 and 1866 the Zollverein went through a series of momentous crises and the issue of commercial organization became increasingly politicized. Austro-Prussian rivalry, industrialization, and liberalism, created a tense atmosphere in which Britain had enormous influence. Using a wide range of German and British sources this study shows how Britain, blindfolded by doctrinaire Free Trade and institutional inadequacy, failed to grasp the connotations of its own actions in the German states and how misinterpretation began to sour Anglo-German relations.

Openness in the international economy happens when countries employ the commercial policies needed to mould free trade into an outcome that serves their national interests. With this conclusion, John Kroll challenges previous attempts to explain movements between free trade and economic closure solely in terms of domestic politics, international distributions of power, or market crises. He demonstrates that the final outcome of economic cooperation or conflict is more complex, determined both by the anarchical structure of international politics and by the policies nations employ to cope with that anarchy. Establishing a theoretical framework that links commercial policies to systemic outcomes, Kroll is able to offer a unique solution to the current debates over trade policy. He takes the major elements of that debate such as calls for aggressive reciprocity, enhanced multilateralism, and expanded trading blocs and establishes how and why each of these policies can influence the stability or instability of free trade systems. Kroll reviews how the GATT has enhanced free trade in the past by institutionalizing some of those policies and explains how GATTs failure to implement other policies will leave it ill equipped to handle future challenges. Kroll combines trade theory and recent works on anarchical cooperation, thereby responding to two recent admonitions in the international relations literature: He eschews ad hoc hypotheses in favor of ones derived from deductive models, and he moves game theory analysis beyond modelling and into the derivation of falsifiable propositions. In the latter book chapters, the author tests his proposition against a case study of British and German behavior during the collapse of free trade in the late nineteenth century.