Henry Charles Carey
​Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879) was born in Philadelphia on December 15, 1793. He was the oldest son of Mathew Carey, himself an important writer in the American Protectionist School. From the age of eight, the younger Carey began working in his father’s publishing firm and bookshop. At the age of twelve, he would then be responsible for managing the Baltimore branch. Eventually, in January of 1817, when Carey was the age of fifteen, he would be made a partner in his father’s business, with the business being rebranded M. Carey & Son. Henry Carey’s brother-in-law, Issac Lea, would then enter the firm in 1821, and in 1824, Mathew Carey would retire. This led to the business being rebranded as H. C. Carey & I. Lea, and then subsequently Carey, Lea, & Carey, after Henry’s brother, Edward L. Carey, entered the firm. Henry Carey would remain in the business until 1836, when he decided to devote his attention to political economy and other business ventures, predominately in coal.
Carey had undertaken limited formal study of political economy prior to 1835, but he tacitly accepted the free trade doctrines of Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say. In 1835, however, Carey had become acquainted with Nassau William Senior’s Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages, which expounded the wage-fund doctrine implicit in Ricardo. Convinced of the errors of this position, Carey undertook a more in-depth study of the question and responded with his Essay on the Rate of Wages in 1836. Carey was still a free trader at this point. Carey then wrote The Harmony of Nature in late 1836, but convinced of its inadequacy, the book never went to print. Then, between 1837 and 1840, Carey would produce his three volume Principles of Political Economy. According to William Elder, “it was in the closing months of 1842, [upon] seeing the wonderful change effected by the protective tariff then in operation” that Carey became convinced that there “must be some great law that” explains why “we always grow rich under protection.” Later, he would receive like a “flash of lightning a conviction that the whole Ricardo-Malthusian system is an error, and that with it must fall the system of British free trade.”
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Carey’s first work as a protectionist would appear in 1848 and was entitled The Past, the Present and the Future. A central theme of this work was Careys’ refutation and reversal of the Ricardian order of cultivation. In 1848, Carey would then assist John S. Skinner in establishing the journal called The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil. Carey contributed numerous articles to this publication, and in 1851, a collection of these articles would appear in his work The Harmony of Interests. Between 1848 and 1857, Carey would also be a regular contributor to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Carey’s most important work, however, would appear in 1858. This was his three volume treatise The Principles of Social Science, which provides the fullest exposition of Carey’s system of political economy. A single volume abridged version of this work, edited by Kate McKean, would also appear later in 1864 under the title Manual of Social Science. Carey’s last major work would appear in 1872. This was The Unity of Law, which represents a philosophical treatise. On October 13, 1879, at the age of eighty-six, Henry Charles Carey would pass away in Philadelphia.