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In the US in the 1790s, the brilliant first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, laid out a programme for the industrialisation of the country by means of infant-industry protection and other policies. Hamilton's programme was developed in the next generation by Henry Clay, under the name of "the American System," and implemented under Clay's disciple and admirer Abraham Lincoln and his successors during the period between the 1860s and the 1940s, when the US became the planet's leading manufacturing economy behind a high wall of tariffs.

The lessons of the "American school" of "national economy," transmitted to Germany by Friedrich List, formed the basis of state-sponsored industrialisation in Wilhelmine Germany. Moreover, during a visit to Germany in the 1870s, Toshimichi Okubo, one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration, became acquainted with the Hamilton-List tradition. Returning to Japan, Okubo founded the ministry of home affairs, which promoted Japanese industry, and in 1874 issued an equivalent of Hamilton's 1791 Report on Manufactures, in the form of his influential Proposal for Industrial Promotion.

By the early 20th century, then, the US, Germany and Japan had successfully used strategic economics to catch up with Britain and (in the case of the first two nations) to surpass it. Even Britain's dominions of Australia and Canada, emulating American and German practice rather than British theory, insisted on the right to use tariffs to keep out goods from Britain and establish their own industrial base. Not that Britain had any right to complain. From the Tudors until the early 19th century, Britain used various protectionist devices to promote its own industries. The 18th-century prime minister Robert Walpole, remembered chiefly today as a corrupt politician pilloried by Alexander Pope, turns out, according to Chang, to have been an industrial-policy mastermind who inspired Alexander Hamilton.
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Excellent!