Marc-William Palen
University of Exeter
Cross-posted from the Transimperial History Blog
Beginning around 1870, the protectionist US Empire sparked a global economic nationalist movement that spread like wildfire across the imperial world order. Late-nineteenth-century expansionists within the Republican Party got things started in the 1860s when they enshrined what was then known as the “American System” of protectionism — high protective tariffs coupled with subsidies for domestic industries and internal improvements — as official US imperial economic policy. By 1900, American System advocates within the GOP carved out a protectionist colonial US empire to insulate itself from the real and perceived imperial machinations of the more industrially advanced British, who had unilaterally embraced a policy of free trade in the 1840s.[1] As I explore in my new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024), the late-nineteenth-century US Empire’s combination of economic nationalism, industrialization, and continental conquest made the American System the preferred model for Britain’s imperial rivals.[2] One unintended consequence of this protectionist transformation of the imperial order was also that the American System helped inspire anticolonial nationalists within the remit of the British Empire where free trade had been forced upon them, most notably Ireland, India, and China.
Continue reading “The Anti-Imperialism of Economic Nationalism: Transimperial Protectionist Networks in Anticolonial Ireland, India, and China”
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