Unprecedented. A globalisation book unlike any other – a thought-provoking journey into the ideas, institutions, and anxieties shaping democracy, trade, and bureaucracy in an open world. Trade has done more to reduce poverty and prevent conflict than most treaties or summits. When people exchange goods, services, ideas, and labour across borders, they become customers rather than enemies, they get to know each other, and war becomes expensive rather than heroic. Yet in recent decades, governments across the world have made trade steadily more difficult, more political, and more conditional – often in the name of safety, sovereignty, or resilience. Forget today’s personalities and political theatre. It is the quiet expansion of economic nationalism through inherited legal frameworks, regulatory templates, and self-replicating bureaucracies that now shapes prosperity and peace. Yet this process remains poorly understood by voters and policymakers alike. Mat Bauer argues that protectionism is driven less by popular demand than by institutional supply. Rules, standards, licences, safeguards, and compliance regimes are designed, copied, and expanded inside bureaucracies whose professional purpose is to produce and manage regulation. Once such instruments exist, they spread across countries and sectors through imitation. Politicians provide the rhetoric, but administrations build the machinery. Over time, economic openness comes to be treated as risk, while legal complexity is framed as national responsibility. This mindset – which Bauer calls the Tariff Man – survives elections, ignores ideology, and thrives wherever careers, budgets, and authority depend on controlling exchange rather than enabling it. Bauer derives these and other lessons from a global inquiry into how economic nationalism operates in practice, told through encounters with broadcasters, NGOs, trade ministries, industrial lobbies, intelligence agencies, presidential offices, and international organisations. The investigation ranges from London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and Washington to Beijing, Delhi, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, Jakarta, and Geneva, revealing how similar the justifications for closure sound across cultures and political systems. Blending political economy with narrative investigation and satire, The Mindset of the Tariff Man explains why nations restrict one of humanity’s most powerful engines of prosperity and peace – and why the freedom to trade remains the only major freedom that governments routinely suspend without calling it repression. Inside this book, you’ll find the conversations that never make it into press releases or policy speeches – spoken quietly in ministries and conference corridors: “Either we exchange goods, services and tourists, or we exchange artillery. Humanity has only ever been offered those two subscription plans.” — Young trade ministry official “If rules were simple, politicians and businesses might understand them. And then we’d all be out of work.” — Trade lawyer “National security is a flexible concept. Even yoghurt can be strategic if a minister says so.” — Foreign intelligence analyst “Free trade requires trust. And the WTO is a place where trust comes to be politely strangled.” — WTO delegate “We love free trade until the Chinese enter the market. Then we love safeguards. Politicians don’t know the difference.” — Big tech industry representative “Western wages are treated as a virtue. We treat them as subsidising our global expansion.” — Minister for state-owned enterprises, large economy “Russia is about missiles, not markets.” — Adviser to the National Security Council