Trade used to be about prosperity. Now it is about power. A globalisation book unlike any other – a sharp, super funny, and thought-provoking journey into the ideas, institutions, and anxieties shaping international trade, bureaucracy, and democracy 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 international conflict becomes expensive rather than heroic. Yet in recent decades, trade ministries across the world have made trade steadily more difficult, more political, and more conditional – often in the name of sovereignty and 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 elected lawmakers 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 more regulation. Once such instruments exist, they spread across countries and sectors through imitation. Politicians provide the rhetoric, but administrations build the machinery. Over time, 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, The Mindset of the Tariff Man explains why nations restrict one of humanity’s most powerful engines of prosperity and peace – and asks a provocative question: should the freedom to trade be considered a human right? 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: “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 World Trade Organization is a place where trust comes to be politely strangled.” – WTO insider “We love free trade until the Chinese enter the market. Then we love safeguards. Politicians don’t know the difference.” – Manufacturing industry lobbyist “Western wages are treated as a virtue. In China, we treat them as subsidising our global expansion.” – Minister for state-owned enterprises “Russia is about missiles, not markets.” – Adviser to the National Security Council “Either we exchange goods, services and tourists, or we exchange artillery. When trade slows, the other industry rarely does.” – Junior ministry official