British economists on competition policy (1890–1920)

It is rather well-known that most turn-of-20th-century US economists gave a rather cool welcome to the Sherman Act (1890), but reacted more favorably to the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission Acts (1914).¹ 

A huge literature has identified several explanations for this evolving and somehow puzzling attitude, calling into play the relation between big business, new technology, and competition, a non-neoclassical notion of competition and an increasingly deeper understanding of anticompetitive business practices. Much less investigated is the reaction of British economists to American antitrust legislation. It may thus be relatively unknown that, during the three decades (1890–1920) of most intense antitrust debates in the United States, the theme occupied a central position even in British economic discourse. Surprisingly enough, given the common legal foundations of both countries, no major British economist favored the adoption of an American-style, statutory-based competition policy.