Prelude to Extreme Protectionism? Norwegian Agricultural Protectionism in a West-European Context, 1850-1940

The topic of the article is to offer a new interpretation of the history of Norway's agricultural protectionism in a West-European context. Agricultural protectionism was not deeply rooted economically, politically or institutionally prior to the Second World War. Before the First World War the most commercially oriented part of Norwegian agriculture - milk production and the dairy industry - was export-oriented. Norway was the last country to join the protectionist wave in the late nineteenth century and in practice it followed the most liberal trade policies in agricultural products next to Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands. It is argued that the 1920s were generally relatively more important and the 1930s relatively less important for later developments than assumed in the most of the literature on agricultural protectionism.