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.
Few conflicts have shaped modern mass political debate and mobilization more than the rivalry of free trade and neomercantilism. Yet the intellectual history of this conflict is underdeveloped. Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica offers a major addition to a small yet growing body of scholarship on the intellectual history of trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by resurrecting a forgotten tradition of mobilization for freer trade among left and left-liberal intellectuals and activists.[1] He paints a vivid tableau of debate among well-known figures in the history of trade, such as the British politicians and campaigners Richard Cobden and Norman Angell, and the less familiar, including the Japanese Christian pacifist Toyohiko Kagawa andradical US feminist Florence Kelley, to show how a simple yet powerful idea circulated around the world: that protectionism made the world less equal and more violent.
Like any political concept, “free trade” is riddled with tensions. What did it mean, say, for a free trading imperialist in the British Empire, who praised its pacifying effects while defending its enforcement at gunpoint in places like India and China? And how could anticolonial visions of trade, which gained steam after the First World War, be squared with the ambitions of postcolonial states to jumpstart their development with protections? By focusing on debates like these, Palen unsettles common associations of free trade with the right or the neoliberal center, showing how, for example, it was an important socialist cause before the dawn of the Cold War. He even suggests the existence of a long-lost “Marx-Manchester” synthesis (93), which was once so tight that to be labeled a free trader, such as during the first US Red Scare in 1919–20, could be tantamount to being called a Bolshevik.
Palen’s book is full of bold arguments and unexpected details, from the tracts of anarchist free traders in Meiji Japan to Georgist designs for the boardgame that eventually became Monopoly.[2]It leaves the reader with the distinct feeling that the twenty-first century is weighed heavily by unresolved political questions from the nineteenth about the relationship of globalization and war, the effects of freer trade on domestic equality and distributional conflict, and the uses of tariffs for both developmentalist and reactionary political projects. The resurgence of old neomercantilist ideas in the 2020s, particularly on the right, Palen concludes, has left an opening for the return of equally old left visions of a “free trade world.” And so the conflict continues.
All four reviewers in this roundtable agree that Palen’s book is empirically rich and deeply researched, perspectival-shifting, and timely. David Ekbladh emphasizes the complexity and sophistication of the worldviews of the protagonists Palen uncovers, including pacifists who espoused deep understandings of the relationship of military power and economics. He also praises Palen for casting a staple figure of US mid-twentieth-century history, the Tennessee politician and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in new light, which shows how Hull unexpectedly acquired a mass following, ultimately winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Palen argues that far from being a “contrivance to mask hegemony,” as Ekbladh puts it, US free traderism at the end of the Second World War had a deep well of support among a broad coalition of political activists and social movements.
Francine McKenzie similarly praises the diversity of voices in Palen’s work, its global reach, and the complexity of its depiction of the “sticky concept” of free trade. She also poses a series of queries for the book’s protagonists: how did they actually think lowering tariffs would, in practice, translate into emancipatory politics; and what made them optimistic about the prospects for a cause that had a relatively poor track record? She also emphasizes, as Palen agrees, that rediscovering the anti-imperialism of some free traders does not make free trade imperialism any less valid an analytic concept. McKenzie suggests a valuable point of departure for further research which involves an equivalently broad intellectual history of protectionism, which was not only a foil for free traders, but itself a cause that inspired many different movements and political actors. Here, the recent work of Eric Helleiner is key.[3]
Sandrine Kottsimilarly emphasizes the important contributions Pax Economica makes to the study of internationalisms and peace movements. She adds further complexity to the story by showing how the Soviet bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) adopted free trade ideas during the Cold War. A similar point has recently been made by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, who argues that Soviet leaders mobilized market ideas against the protectionist and market-distorting policies of their Western rivals.[4] Kott also suggests that a study which draws on other European contexts (as well as on Catholic thinkers as much as Protestants) could offer an important complement to Palen’s story, which is largely rooted in Anglo-American ideas and their global dissemination.
Martin Conwayagrees that Palen’s work forces us to rethink assumptions about free trade ideas serving simply as a cloak for narrow economic or geopolitical interests, or as a “lost cause espoused by a fringe of naïve liberal groups.”At the same time, Conway also points to the challenges faced by globally-focused intellectual histories. He notes that as much as showing what united otherwise very different writers, it is equally important to consider the specific and context-bound nature of their political aims. The dissemination of free trade ideas, as Palen’s book shows, was itself driven by “Western globalization.” But these ideas took on lives of their own as they intersected with an array of political causes—from Indian independence to Chinese Nationalism to interwar US feminism.
These rich suggestions for future research and debate, and Palen’s response to his reviewers, all speak to the ambition and vision of Pax Economica—and to the importance of the story it tells for the politics of our own time.
Contributors:
Marc-William Palen is a historian at the University of Exeter. He is editor of The Imperial & Global Forum and co-director of History & Policy’s Global Economics and History Forum in London. His newest book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024) was named one of Financial Times’ “best books of 2024” and made the New Yorker’s 2024 “best books” list. He is also author of The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Jamie Martin is Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University. He is a historian of international political economy, empire, and the world wars. His book, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard, 2022), received the 2023 World History Association Connected Book Award and the 2023 Transatlantic Studies and Cambridge University Press Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2023 Susan Strange Best Book Prize. He is now writing a history of the world economy during the First World War. His public writing has appeared in The New York Times, London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, n+1, and Bookforum.
Martin Conway is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a number of works on different aspects of the history of twentieth-century Europe, including Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton University Press, 2020), which has also appeared in an Italian translation: L’età della democrazia (Carocci, 2023).
David Ekbladh is Professor of History and core faculty in International Relations at Tufts University. His books include, Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War (with Thomas Zeiler and Benjamin Montoya, Oxford University Press, 2017), TheGreat American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton University Press, 2010), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Sandrine Kott is a full Professor of Modern European History at the University of Geneva and Visiting Professor at New York University. She has studied History in Paris, the University of Bielefeld, (FRG), and Columbia University (New York). Her main fields of expertise are the history of social welfare and labor in France and Germany since the end of the nineteenth century and labor (and power) relations in those countries of real socialism, in particular in the German Democratic Republic. In Geneva she has developed the transnational and global dimensions of each of her fields of expertise by taking advantage of the archives and resources of international organizations and particularly of the International Labor Organization. She has initiated in 2009 the History of International Organizations Network, a collaborative online research platform and seminar series http://www.hion.ch/.
Francine McKenzie is a Professor of History at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Rebuilding the Postwar Order: Peace, Security and the UN-System, 1941–1948 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History (University of British Columbia Press, 2017). She is in the early stages of two projects, one on the discourse of peace in the 1940s and another on tensions between the conception and practice of international trade and liberal theories.
U.S. Marines raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, Feb. 23, 1945. (Joe Rosenthal/AP)
Marc-William Palen History Department, University of Exeter
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Marc-William Palen History Department, University of Exeter
“Tariff Man” Trump continues to tear up the trading system while also making imperial demands for territorial expansion. To just about everyone’s surprise, his grand colonial scheme to “make America great again” now includes making Canada the 51st state – and using the threat of punitive tariffs to get what he wants.
Some, like the Washington Post‘s Max Boot, have been making the case that Trump’s coercive use of tariffs to obtain concessions “unrelated to trade” is “novel.”
But though Trump often cites 19th-century pro-tariff President William McKinley as his inspiration, Trump is using tariffs quite differently from the way that most other U.S. presidents — or other world leaders — have used them. Typically, tariffs are enacted either to raise revenue or to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. Trump, by contrast, is using tariffs as a coercive instrument of statecraft to achieve aims that are unrelated to trade.
Boot’s piece raises good points of comparison, including parallels with Chinese economic coercion today. And I agree that the results of Trump’s tariffs will likely be a net negative for the United States.
But I disagree that Trump’s coercive use of tariffs is new; rather, it’s straight out of the GOP’s old protectionist playbook.
Demonstrators protesting a treaty to return control of the Panama Canal to Panama, U.S. Capitol building, Washington, D.C, Sept. 7, 1977. Warren K Leffler—US News & World Report Magazine Collection/PhotoQuest/Getty Images
‘Warrants a whole other documentary’: Patrice Lumumba’s adviser and speechwriter,Andrée Blouin, centre, from Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. Photograph: Modern Films
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1921 WILPF Executive Committee: Front row, left to right: Cornelia Ramnodt-Hirschmann, Gabrielle Duchêne, Lida Gustava Heymann, Yella Hertzka, Jane Addams, Catherine Marshall, Gertrude Baer. Back row, left to right: Emily Greene Balch and Thora Daugaard. WikiCommons, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1921_WILPF_Executive_Committee.jpg
The world disorder of 2024 would have looked all too familiar to the international women’s peace movement of a century ago.
Feminists back then tended to see themselves as the mothers of the world, believing that women’s active participation in politics would curb or counter men’s militant predilection for nationalism and war. ‘First wave’ feminist internationalists numbered among the leaders of the early-20th-century fight for world peace, what Harriet Alonso has described as “the suffragist wing” of the international peace movement from the First World War onwards.
Free trade was a key – but oft-overlooked – ingredient to their feminist vision for a peaceful world. Chicago social reformer Jane Addams, the figurehead of the international women’s peace movement, emphasized this free-trade dimension throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
Jane Addams made landfall in Europe in early July 1919 to bear witness to the destructive aftermath of the First World War. Addams’s main concern was the famine afflicting millions of Europe’s children.
Addams’s 1919 trek marked the beginning of what would become a multi-year European humanitarian mission of a new left-leaning feminist organization: the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), which remains active today. Addams was WILPF’s inaugural president.
Addams had her first of many encounters with Europe’s malnourished children during a stopover in Lille in northern France. There, inside a schoolhouse, Addams looked on as a physician examined them by the hundreds. ‘Stripped to the waist’, the children looked more like ‘a line of moving skeletons; their little shoulder blades stuck straight out, the vertebrae were all perfectly distinct as were their ribs, and their bony arms hung limply at their sides.’
Adding to the macabre scene, an eerie quiet hung over the improvised emergency room. You see, the French physician on duty had lost his voice, a side effect of wartime shellshock. He therefore ‘whispered his instructions to the children as he applied his stethoscope and the children, thinking it was some sort of game, all whispered back to him.
Addams encountered similarly graphic scenes in Switzerland and throughout Germany. The 1919 WILPF mission’s findings reinforced her belief that, while the war may have ended, securing the peace had just begun.
Addams therefore headed a follow-up WILPF humanitarian mission amid the hot summer of 1921, this time to southeastern Europe, where she once again encountered mass hunger. ‘Food resources which were produced in Europe itself and should have been available for instant use,’ Addams wrote, ‘were prevented from satisfying the desperate human needs. Why? Because ‘a covert war was being carried on by the use of import duties and protective tariffs’, which the war’s food blockades had legitimized.
These small starving European states, seeking self-preservation, mistakenly ‘imitated the great Allies with their protectionist policies, with their colonial monopolies and preferences.’ To Addams, such suffering in the name of ‘hypernationalism’ only amplified the need for a new international system of ‘free labor and exchange’ The world faced a clear choice: either ‘freedom of international commerce or international conflict of increasing severity.’
To meet world food demands, her envisaged free-trade order would also require supranational regulation of global transportation lines to counter ‘the ambition of rival nations.’
She called her cosmopolitan vision ‘Pax Economica’.
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