Tag: Talking Empire

Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Richard Toye and Marc-William Palen
University of Exeter

In this episode of the Talking Empire series, Professor Richard Toye sat down with Marc-William Palen to discuss his new book Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024). Pax Economica recovers the radical left-wing origins of free trade and globalization.

Through a wide-ranging discussion – from Gershwin musicals, to Norman Angell, to cheap food, and neoliberalism – Palen discusses with Toye the ways in which the book’s actors strike a stark contrast to today’s common association of free trade with right-wing free marketeers. Pax Economica‘s counterhistory of an idea traces how – beginning in the mid-19th century – liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians joined left-wing forces to undermine imperialism and war.

Through networks crisscrossing the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires, these left-wing globalists condemned the economic nationalist turn to high tariffs and government subsidies among the industrializing empires after 1870. They argued that the extreme protectionism and trade wars of the rival Euro-American empires created the monopolies, trusts, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion that followed, culminating in two world wars.

Their envisaged left-wing free trade order – what they called their “pax economica” – instead promised peace, prosperity, democracy, and decolonization, to be maintained through supranational governance via the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the World Trade Organizaiton. The book’s findings offer timely lessons for our increasingly economic nationalist and war-torn world.

Click here for further details and to purchase a copy.

Parliamentary Empire, British Democracy and settler colonialism: a new Talking Empire podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter


Professor Richard Toye interviews Professor David Thackeray, also of the University of Exeter and the centre of Imperial Global History. David is principal investigator on a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which is called ‘Parliamentary Empire, British Democracy and settler colonialism, 1867 to 1939’.

New ‘Talking Empire’ Podcast: Richard Toye and Henry Knight Lozano on U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West

Published on by CIGH Exeter

In the newest in CIGH’s ‘Talking Empire‘ series, Professor Richard Toye interviews Dr. Henry Knight Lozano about his book California and Hawai’i Bound: U.S. Settler Colonialism and the Pacific West, 1848-1959, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2021.

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism – A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

lenin-imperialism

V. I. Lenin penned and published his influential pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in the midst of the First World War. Building upon Marxist contemporaries like Hilferding and Bukharin as well as non-Marxist theorists like J. A. Hobson, Lenin’s pamphlet would quickly come to embody the orthodox Marxist critique concerning the relationship between modern capitalism and imperialism. In this Talking Empire podcast, Dr Marc-William Palen discusses Lenin’s Imperialism and its legacy with Professor Richard Toye.

J. A. Hobson and Imperialism – A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

john_atkinson_hobson (1)In 1902, journalist John A. Hobson published Imperialism: A Study. The book was among the first to connect the  rise of finance capital with the growth of imperial expansion after 1870. Hobson’s theory would fast number among the most influential critiques of imperialism. Although Hobson himself was not a Marxist (he was a classical liberal), his theory would play a key role in shaping subsequent Marxist theories of imperialism, most notably that of V. I. Lenin.

In this Talking Empire podcast, Centre Director Richard Toye discusses Hobson’s Imperialism with Dr. Marc-William Palen.

 

Britain, France, and their Roads From Empire: A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

fight or flight thomasMartin Thomas’s path-breaking book Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and their Roads from Empire tells how the world’s two largest colonial empires disintegrated dramatically after the Second World War. Although shattered by war, in 1945 Britain and France still controlled the world’s two largest colonial empires, with imperial territories stretched over four continents. And they appeared determined to keep them: the roll-call of British and French politicians, soldiers, settlers and writers who promised in word and print at this time to defend their colonial possessions at all costs is a long one. Yet, within twenty years both empires had almost completely disappeared.

The collapse was cataclysmic. Peaceable ‘transfers of power’ were eclipsed by episodes of territorial partition and mass violence whose bitter aftermath still lingers. Hundreds of millions across four continents were caught up in the biggest reconfiguration of the international system ever seen.

In this new Talking Empire podcast Professor Thomas talks about the book with Professor Richard Toye.

Violence and Colonial Order: A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

thomas violence and colonial order

Richard Toye
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @RichardToye

Professor Martin Thomas’s book Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918-1940 is a pioneering, multi-empire account of the relationship between the politics of imperial repression and the economic structures of European colonies between the two World Wars. Ranging across colonial Africa, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, Thomas explores the structure of local police forces, their involvement in colonial labour control and the containment of uprisings and dissent. This work sheds new light on broader trends in the direction and intent of colonial state repression. It shows that the management of colonial economies, particularly in crisis conditions, took precedence over individual imperial powers’ particular methods of rule in determining the forms and functions of colonial police actions. In this Talking Empire podcast, I interview Professor Thomas about the issues raised by the book.

What’s So Shocking about the Wretched of the Earth?

Published on by CIGH Exeter2 Comments

fanon wretched of the earth

Richard Toye
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @RichardToye

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) was a psychiatrist, intellectual and revolutionary. Born in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, Fanon spent significant periods of his life in France and, crucially, Algeria. There he became an active member of the Front de Libération Nationale that fought, with ultimate success, against French rule. His most famous work The Wretched of the Earth, published shortly before his death from leukaemia, is a classic of decolonization literature. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it in his preface:  Continue reading “What’s So Shocking about the Wretched of the Earth?” →

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and US Imperialism

Published on by CIGH Exeter

Marc-William Palen
History Department, University of Exeter
Follow on Twitter @MWPalen

The_Tragedy_of_American_DiplomacyWilliam Appleman Williams is considered the founder of the “strongly influential” Wisconsin School of U.S. foreign relations imperial history that took root from within the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Williams’s book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, first published in 1959, was the first of many revisionist imperial histories of American foreign policy that appeared amid what would become the broader radical New Left movement. Continue reading “The Tragedy of American Diplomacy and US Imperialism” →

Adam Smith and Empire: A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter3 Comments

Marc-William Palen

Wealth of NationsWithin the field of imperial history, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) is commonly associated with the anti-imperial economic doctrine that arose in the mid nineteenth century alongside the rise of Free Trade England. This ideology drew inspiration from Smith’s condemnation of the British Empire for being unnecessarily mercantilistic, expensive, and atavistic. Smith’s critique of imperialism came to be known as “Cobdenism”, named after Victorian free trade apostle Richard Cobden, the anti-imperial radical who led the overthrow of England’s protectionist Corn Laws in 1846.

But the longer imperial legacy of the Wealth of Nations is much more . . . complicated. Smith’s work was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates.

Continue reading “Adam Smith and Empire: A New Talking Empire Podcast” →

A Decade of ‘Imperial Absent-Mindedness’: A New Talking Empire Podcast

Published on by CIGH Exeter6 Comments

porter absentminded imperialistsRichard Toye

In 2004, Bernard Porter published The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain. It immediately became a controversial work. Porter later reflected that the book:

was mainly a response to certain scholars (and some others) who, I felt, had hitherto simplified and exaggerated the impact of ‘imperialism’ on Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after years in which, except by empire specialists like myself, it had been rather ignored and underplayed. […] the main argument of the book was this: that the ordinary Briton’s relationship to the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was complex and ambivalent, less soaked in or affected by imperialism than these other scholars claimed – to the extent that many English people, at any rate, possibly even a majority, were almost entirely ignorant of it for most of the nineteenth century.[1] Continue reading “A Decade of ‘Imperial Absent-Mindedness’: A New Talking Empire Podcast” →

Orientalism and its Legacies: New Talking Empire Podcasts

Published on by CIGH Exeter1 Comment

SaidOrientalismRichard Toye

Edward Said (1935-2003) was one of the foremost intellectuals of the Twentieth Century. Heavily influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, his work spanned the fields of literature, history, and post-colonial studies. He was a controversial figure, and none of his work is more debated than his landmark 1978 book Orientalism. Said recast this term so that it referred to the structures of knowledge – or rather discourse – through which Westerners constructed the image of the East. Continue reading “Orientalism and its Legacies: New Talking Empire Podcasts” →

Talking Empire: The Gallagher-Robinson Controversy

Published on by CIGH Exeter2 Comments

The Centre for Imperial and Global History is pleased to announce its new ‘Talking Empire’ podcast series. Hosted by Professor Richard Toye, Centre academics are developing a series of podcasts on controversies in global and imperial history, which are available to listen to for free on this page.

AfricaVictoriansWith this first installment, Centre Director Andrew Thompson discusses the longstanding debates surrounding the work of Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. In their path-breaking 1953 Economic History Review article, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Gallagher and Robinson suggested that the so-called ‘New Imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century was not new at all. They argued instead that imperial historians had previously missed Britain’s informal imperial expansion following its adoption of free trade policies c. 1850. The authors expanded further upon their informal imperial findings with Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (1961).

Listen to the three installments of Andrew Thompson discussing the controversial legacy of Gallagher and Robinson: Continue reading “Talking Empire: The Gallagher-Robinson Controversy” →