A Workers’ Vision of Free Trade? British Free Trade Debates at the Dawn of International Organization

This article explores the debates concerning ‘free trade’ in Britain and the British Empire in the early twentieth century. After many decades of commitment to a broad, laissez-faire understanding of the concept, the First World War years lent strength to calls for a stronger state hand in international trade management, which took limited but concrete form through the passage of various protective laws. A new labour vision of free trade developed in the period as well, however, which emphasized the necessity of transnational solidarity for the wellbeing of all workers. This vision played an important role in holding back the tide of protectionism in Britain for a time, helping to enable the space for the 1927 World Economic Conference to take place. While contributing a degree of support to the idea of free trade in general, the labour vision did not have a major policy impact on the international level, and following the outbreak of the Great Depression, Britain followed the rest of the world in erecting high tariff barriers. Despite the limitations it faced in its time, the early twentieth-century British labour vision of free trade is valuable to recover, offering an alternative image of global trade freedom.