The trade stand-off between the US and China escalated this week, with Beijing announcing it would increase tariffs in turn. Donald Trump doesn’t seem to understand what he is doing – he has claimed the Chinese would have to pay for his tariffs on Chinese goods coming into the US, when Americans do. But why are they called “tariffs” anyway?
The word comes from the Italian “tariffa” for arithmetic or accounting, and was first used in English for mathematical tables, before it became a specialised word for customs duties. (The “tariff” was originally the whole set of such duties, or what is now called the “schedule” of tariffs.) Thereafter it could also apply to the list of charges made by a hotel, or a sentencing scale for more or less severe examples of certain crimes.
In trade, the danger is that tit-for-tat tariffists (as tariff advocates can be called) can blunder into less metaphorical battles. Writing in 1934, Aldous Huxley observed that “orgies of nationalism” lead inevitably to war, and that “tariff-wars” were “symptoms” of the “war-disease” itself. It remains to be seen whether this is among Trump’s ailments.
