At the dawn of a second Trump administration, one that has promised tariffs as the solution to the United States’ economic woes, Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica could not be timelier. The book grows out of his previous work, which detailed the way so many early adherents of free trade ideology also “advocated against imperialism in its myriad manifestations” (The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 2016, xi). Pax Economica extends this insight and reveals how a range of progressive activists and reformers—peace advocates, abolitionists, feminists, Christian radicals, and some early socialists—shared a commitment to free trade as central to their vision of a peaceful, prosperous, and more just world. In so arguing, Palen presents an alternative history of free trade, one that has been obscured by more recent accounts associating it with free market ideologues on the right (e.g., Milton Friedman). Palen insists that this history is wrong, or at least very incomplete, and that returning to the nineteenth century reveals a quite different story.In fact, Palen shows that for nearly a century, from the 1840s through World War II, free trade adherents drew affinities between open markets, democracy, and anti-imperialism, on the one hand, and economic nationalism, aristocracy, and imperialism, on the other. The “age of empire” was an era dominated by protectionism, with the important exception of Britain. Reformers and activists on the “left” hoped to usher in a more peaceful, cosmopolitan world and believed open international trade was a key tool in their efforts.The campaign against the protectionist Corn Law well represents Palen’s argument and the specific, nineteenth-century context in which a “left-wing” free trade made sense. Here reformers of various stripes, led by the father of Manchester liberalism Richard Cobden and supported by a range of transatlantic reformers, successfully lobbied the British government to repeal tariffs on grain, thus bringing down the cost of bread for ordinary Britons. That was in 1846 and seemed, to many observers, to herald a new day of global peace and prosperity. And yet, as Palen shows, outside Britain, an era of protectionism and neomercantilism followed that would reign supreme until the global crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Then a new generation of free trade advocates sought to instantiate their vision of global peace and prosperity through multilateral international organizations such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their hopes for a “left-wing” version of free trade, like those of their predecessors, would be swiftly dashed—this time fatally. In the second half of the twentieth century, the most vocal free trade advocates would come from a right that was hostile to labor unions, anticolonial struggles, the welfare state, and democracy alike. And the neomercantilist “pax Americana” of our own era signals a retreat not just from free trade but also from the cosmopolitan, progressive goals to which the original “pax economica” vision had linked it.Palen’s extensively researched (and illustrated) chapters bring to life the vibrancy of this progressive free trade vision, shared by a motley crew of thinkers and activists—including Cobden, the social democrat Jane Addams, the founder of the universalist language Esperanto, and the New Dealer Cordell Hull (the “Tennessee Cobden”). He persuasively recovers this tradition of economic thought that viewed open markets as a crucial tool to achieve a more equal, democratic, and peaceful world. Readers of this journal will likely be curious about how labor fits into Palen’s narrative and about his use of the term left wing to describe his key actors. The treatment of Karl Marx—perhaps the most obvious representative of left-wing ideology in the nineteenth century—suggests some of the difficulty here. Palen groups Marx with his larger band of progressive free trade advocates, even though Marx’s rationale for supporting free trade differed drastically from the rest. Free trade, Marx thought, was merely the next stage in capitalist development, so supporting it would hasten the revolution. Anti–Corn Law advocates insisted that cheaper grain would feed the poor, but they focused far less on the exploitation of workers, at home or abroad. The book perhaps thus delineates a “liberal” worldview more than a “left-wing” one, though that term can be hard to pin down. The awkwardness can be heard in Palen’s characterization of some figures as “radical liberals” and others as “left-leaning liberal radical reformers,” while postwar multilateral organizations like the IMF or General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade can only be described as liberal.Palen’s book is a valuable contribution to the intellectual history of capitalism. It demonstrates the merit of tracing ideas or concepts carefully over time and situating them in their original contexts. Though the prospects for the intellectual tradition he recovers here—a vision of a peaceful and prosperous world facilitated by free trade—seem dim today as protectionism rises around the world, remembering the progressive commitments of its earlier adherents is nonetheless bracing.
Leslie Butler (Sun,) studied this question.