This article in Prospect by Ha-Joon Chang is a great summary of the history of selective protectionism in the success of growing economies - and the failure of the Washington Consensus in Africa and Latin America. There's one sublime quote in it:

There is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best. It is this sleight of hand that free-trade economists have so effectively deployed against their opponents—if you are against free trade, they imply, you must be against trade itself, and so against economic progress.

This is spot on. Three successful popular authors who've sold a lot of books off the back of this sleight of hand are Martin Wolf ('Why Globalisation Works'), Jagdish Bhagwati (In Defence of Globalisation) and Philippe Legrain (Open World). Each paint a caricatured picture of a dark and dangerous force of half-witted 'anti-globalisation' activists blindly throwing bricks at the forces of light working through the international trade regime. The public must be alerted to the danger before its too late.

I love coming across sentences like that: 'there is a huge difference between saying that trade is essential for economic development and saying that free trade is best.' It's the kind of thing you could spend years arriving at, or happen to type down accidentally one night in a moment of sleep-deprived clarity. Completely obvious, but entirely possible to lose sight of while reading the above clarion-calls for free trade.