Mathew Carey s long-neglected The New Olive Branch offers new insight into political economy as it really happened. This is the first-ever scholarly edition of Carey s most important economic work. Like other volumes in Anthem s Economic Ideas that Built America series, it gives the reader easy access to historical works that have been dropped from the modern economic canon because of their uncomfortable fit with contemporary conceptions of classical economics rooted in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.

In The New Olive Branch, Carey derided those so-called...