‘Free trade’, exhorted a contributor to the American Federationist, the newspaper of the American Federation of Labor, ‘will save the farmer and maintain the purchasing power of the nation’.[1] William Graham Sumner, meanwhile, among the staunchest opponents of organised labour in the United States, agreed that unrestricted international ‘commerce is a blessing to mankind in every point of view. It does not need to be watched or regulated’. Protectionism, meanwhile, was ‘corrupting our public life [and] debauching the people with their own money’.[2] Michael Davitt, the radical Irish nationalist, land nationaliser, and labour activist, felt similarly. ‘I am a free trader’, he proclaimed, ‘because I believe in freedom – freedom political, racial, and economic for all’.[3] A parallel enthusiasm for free trade, however, could be found in the work of economist Edward Atkinson, who not only thought that free trade ‘tends to the maintenance of peace, order, and industry’, but declared protectionist policies to be the mirror of labour laws, condemning both as ‘socialistic or even communistic in their very essence’.[4]

It would be an understatement to suggest that free trade has not historically fit comfortably along a left-right political axis. As these quotes show, even within the final couple of decades of the 19th century, there were a wide variety of political impulses and intentions behind the idea of ‘free trade’, which was itself a capacious and capricious term. A century later, however, as demonstrators at the 1999 World Trade Organisation protests in Seattle held placards with the slogan ‘Free Trade = Dead Sea Turtles’, and Time magazine noted emphatically that ‘the world may never again think the same way about free trade and what it costs’, the discursive terrain appeared to have been firmly settled: free trade was an extractive, coercive, neoliberal doctrine, unequivocally on the political right.[5]

Marc-William Palen’s ambition in Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton, 2024) is to change the way we think about the history of free trade. This impressive and comprehensive monograph charts the uneven trajectory of an optimistic, humanitarian free trade liberalism, from its Cobdenite ascendancy in the 1840s, right through to the present day. Palen assembles an extensive cast of characters to populate this story, alongside an intimidating array of organisations (and their acronyms), that allow him to trace the persistence of one key intellectual assumption: that increased freedom of trade would produce greater interconnection and interdependence, and therefore reduce global conflict and lead to peace. While the ‘left wing’ of the title tends to cover a very broad range of political inclination here, there is undoubtedly a coherence and persistence to the ‘pacifistic visions of a liberal order of open trade and world fraternity’ that Palen takes as his focus. These ideas anchor his study as he shows how, despite the changing contexts and discourses, this vision of a peaceful and just global political economy never entirely disappeared.

The chapters are largely thematic, with each addressing a specific topic in rough chronological fashion. The first two act as a couplet, covering the relationship between protectionism and imperialism, and then how liberals orientated their free trade arguments to oppose imperial ventures. Appraised here are the dominant influences of both Fredrich List, the German born economist whose ideas shaped the protectionist ‘American system’ of national political economy, and his foil, Richard Cobden, the English radical liberal whose name would become synonymous with free trade. An important feature of these early chapters is Palen’s attempt to overturn the ‘enduring myth’ that the late 19th century was a period of free trade. In this he is in good company. Work in this area has long emphasised—as Anthony Howe put it in his 1998 work Free Trade and Liberal England—that a ‘revivified’ protectionist tradition was ‘enthusiastically endorsed’ by the 1880s across the major European and American economies.[6] The persistence of this myth, despite firm countervailing force from historians, is partly due to a tendency to blur distinctions between increased trade and financial globalisation on the one hand, and free trade on the other. Recent work has supported Palen’s conclusions that, while the period c.1870 – 1914 was a critical moment for globalisation, it was much more firmly marked by trade conflict than liberalisation. As Sven Beckert has noted, ‘Manchesterism’ had been deflated by the economic crises of the 1870s and, by 1900, ‘territorializing commodity chains, not free trade, seemed to point the way to the future’.[7]

Right from the beginning then, this is also a story about defeat and unrealised hopes. The lofty ambitions of radical liberal free traders were matched at each point by the persistent appeal, for both left and right, of protectionist economic policies. Palen pays close attention to these challenges as he examines how, ‘from imperial metropoles to colonial peripheries, the American System, rather than British-style free trade, became the economic model of choice’. This was particularly evident in the wake of the United States’ rapid growth following the Civil War. Threatened by improvements in communications and transport that made their economies vulnerable to American production, continental European powers responded by expanding and consolidating their empires as protected markets. Palen is particularly alert to the intellectual influence of the German Historical School in training American scholars of political economy in protectionism and—an inextricably related development—the role of an active state in shaping economic life. Here the question of what (and who) gets to count as ‘left wing’ is open to interpretation. While this progressive liberal economic approach was clearly in tension with the older radical and republican vision of economic freedom, it nevertheless favoured interventionist protections for labour from the state as central to its politics. The German trained progressive protectionist Richard T. Ely was described by Eleanor Marx as the political economist ‘most favourably disposed to the labourers as a class’ for his support of protective labour laws, while Henry George, the tribune of popular radicalism and one of the last representatives of that older free trade liberalism, opposed child labour laws on the basis that ‘all such remedies begin at the wrong end’, by treating the symptoms rather than the causes.[8] Free trade was undoubtedly a key radical commitment, universalist and internationalist, and tied up closely with opposition to paternalist governance, but it did not always sit comfortably within taxonomies of left and right.

Liberal optimism about the possibilities opened up by free trade, and the economic justice and international harmony that would result, is the focus of the second chapter. With great literary skill, Palen is able to reconstruct the mental world of mid-Victorian radical liberals, leading the reader around London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 and the hopes for peaceful economic integration it represented for those ‘cosmopolitan idealists’ (p. 53). This loose association of transatlantic radical liberals saw free trade as just one cornerstone of a morally just political economy, often alongside a strident abolitionism, anti-imperialism, and enthusiasm for land reform. Yet, by the end of the 1870s, this collection of mutually reinforcing assumptions, and their underpinning presumptions about social harmony, were under severe strain. Proceding chronologically, each chapter in the book confronts the particular inflection point of the 1880s and 1890s. Although there remained significant rhetorical continuity, by the early 20th century the moral vision that had underpinned earlier liberal radicals’ understandings of free trade had been largely excised. Gone was the assumption of an underlying harmony and, correspondingly, in came a more positive view of the role of the state and often a much more ambivalent attitude to political participation and democracy. While the earlier free trade vision rejected overarching state control for the same reasons it rejected tariffs—the external imposition of order restraining the potential for harmonious human interaction—the New Liberal support for free trade was grounded in arguments for economic and political expediency rather than any grand moral vision. The point is not occluded in the book, and Palen is clear that ‘the degree of the New Liberal faith in the role of regulatory governance at both national and international level’ was a ‘notable difference’ from earlier perspectives. (p. 82) The extent to which this shift offers a significant challenge to the ideological continuity of these left-wing visions of free trade, however, is a question open to readers. As the book demonstrates, the pressures of imperial competition, technological and industrial complexity, and the looming threat of global conflict in the 20th century drew liberal advocates of free trade toward ideas of world federation and global governance as a means of achieving peace through trade. Although the term ‘free trade’ clung on tenaciously, this was much more of an ordered and technocratic trade.

While making a strong case for the radical liberal position on free trade, and its relationship with anti-imperialism, on a conceptual level, the work also acknowledges the significant weight of the anti-colonial protectionist tradition. Palen’s first book, The Conspiracy of Free Trade, addresses similar questions but from a different perspective and within a narrower context. Following on from this, Palen describes how the ‘Anglophobic US political system’ tended to be hostile to free trade in the early 19th century, seeing it—as many other postcolonial nations did—as a tool of British commercial domination. (p. 15) The book takes these positions seriously, looking closely at the persistence of this view. It was not only the American economist Henry C. Carey who saw the catastrophe of Irish economic life as an example of what, overweighted with sarcasm, he called ‘the blessings of British free trade’; this was naturally a perspective common among Irish, Egyptian, or Indian nationalists.[9] Henry George, whom Palen rightly centres as a key figure in late Victorian free trade radicalism, found his ideas on free trade to be much harder to sell to his Irish and Irish-American audience than his advocacy of land nationalisation. The postcolonial experience tended to support this critical view and, as Palen makes clear, protectionism was often as much about securing national independence against imperial power as it was about securing imperial markets to buttress geopolitical competition.

One of the book’s most significant historiographical suggestions arrives in chapter three, which offers an account of the ‘socialist internationalist free-trade tradition’. The new terminology—describing a hyphenated ‘Marx-Manchester tradition’—suggests a much firmer and more ideologically coherent relationship between socialism and liberal radicalism. Here, the work sits comfortably alongside recent attempts to resuscitate Marx’s republican ideological inheritance, and indeed older historiographical debates over the continuity between radicalism and socialism at the end of the 19th century. The ‘Marx-Manchester’ thesis is, ironically, at its weakest with Marx himself. As Palen shows, Marx’s qualified support for free trade was based on its dialectical role in accelerating the contradictions of capital, rather than any suggestion it would lead directly to peace and global fraternity—a significant divergence from his liberal contemporaries, of course. Nevertheless, the connection is more visible as the book traces socialists’ critiques of imperialist protectionism and militarism from luminaries like Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein. In Britain especially, the relationship between Edwardian radical liberalism and the new Labour party was strong, particularly through the lingering influence of Georgism, but also in the shared tradition of 19th century radicalism, which had travelled over the bridge of popular Gladstonianism.

The consistency with which the term ‘free trade’ itself is tussled over is particularly interesting. Various political factions showed a desire to claim ‘free trade’, often with a modifier like ‘true’ or ‘real’ preceding it—indicative of the political optimism and internationalism that remained attached to the term well into the 20th century. These associations had continuing appeal for socialists, as Palen deftly demonstrates, but the consequent malleability of the term makes it challenging to demonstrate the coherence of free trade visions on the left. At the same time, the book is laudably far-reaching in exploring the heterogenous ways that free trade could be used. For its Christian advocates, examined in chapter five, support for free trade emerged from the principles of Christian universalism, and religious commitment was not only a motivator, but tended to keep optimistic ideas of social harmony alive as well. As Palen shows, Georgism and co-operativism fed from similar sources, interlocking with each other to form a potent nexus of moralistic and principled attempts to secure global peace.

Chapter four charts ‘Free-Trade Feminism’, and the particular association of free trade with various national and international women’s peace organisations. Questions of consumption were tied closely to Victorian notions of women’s domestic responsibilities. This, alongside the idea of a pacificist feminine temperament, made peace-through-trade advocacy a notable arena for women’s political activism. Here, Palen carefully details the influential role of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and its inaugural President Jane Addams, in pressing for a cosmopolitan vision of ‘free trade regulated through supranational governance’ (p. 151). The story charts quite a close-knit collection of predominantly middle-class activists, many of whom were members of prominent families or were connected with notable free trade advocates. With impressive detail, Palen demonstrates the global reach of the organisations led by these women, and the extensive influence they wielded—at least in part through their impact on Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and his ambitions for ‘a more peaceful and integrated economic order’. As the story moves more firmly into the 20th century, the visions of free trade peace explored here become more comfortable with this kind of terminology, and the more anarchistic elements of earlier free trade arguments are increasingly difficult to find.

This chapter also provides an interesting account of the free trade commitments of Florence Kelley, a social reformer perhaps best known for her work on child labour laws and ethical consumerism. Kelley worked to translate and republish Marx’s ‘Speech on the Question of Free Trade’ during Grover Cleveland’s 1888 presidential campaign, with the intention of drawing socialists to the Democratic candidate. She would later go on to lead the National Consumers’ League, an organisation devoted to marshalling purchasing power to support social causes, and to boycott companies with poor labour practices. The ambiguity over whether these kinds of social interventions in the market—which Palen rightly points to as precursors to the late 20th century Fair Trade movement—can be said to count as examples of ‘free trade’ demonstrates just how pliable the term was and remains. At other points in the book, such as when discussing the Indian Swadeshi policy, or the economic resistance of Irish nationalists to the British state, the practice of boycotting is taken to be emblematic of anti-colonial protectionism rather than free trade. This uncertainty was a problem contemporaries faced, too: while the Women’s Peace Society attacked boycotts as protectionist in the 1930s, J. A. Hobson, a conventional New Liberal whose free trade commitments were grounded in visions for global peace through an international order, saw the economic boycott as a valuable tool for global governance that would prevent military escalation.[10] As a social or political restraint on trade, self-described ‘free traders’ often either supported or opposed boycotting based on how useful it was for other purposes. For some 19^th-century radicals, boycotts were archetypical free trade actions, primarily because they avoided state involvement. But, given that New Liberals were busy at work deconstructing the boundaries between community, state, and global governance, and that they embraced state regulation in service of ‘free trade’, the boundaries between a ‘free trade’ or ‘protectionist’ boycott remained interminably fuzzy—a microcosm of the broader definitional challenge. One of the central theses Palen presents is that the free trade movement became one for fair trade. Yet, directing trade toward desirable ends (whatever one considered those ends to be) was a protectionist ambition, too.  As the book demonstrates, the ‘free’ in free trade was, throughout the period in question, a conceptual minefield.

This challenge becomes greater, as Palen acknowledges, once we enter the post-war 20th century. The Cold War quickly upended hopes for a multilateral system of economic governance that would have satisfied liberal peace activists. In this new world, ‘free trade’ soon became even more of a rhetorical cudgel. Complex trade policies themselves, Palen observes, ‘could be sold domestically as free-trade initiatives to some, protectionist blocs to others’ (p. 195). The key historiographical contention here is that historians have largely accepted the discursive framing of this U.S.-led system, characterised initially by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, as one of ‘free trade’. This has encouraged left-wing critics to reaffirm the connection between ‘free trade’ and exploitative neoliberal and neocolonial economic dominance. Palen acknowledges that the left-wing peace and free-trade activists of the post-war period were more open to anti-colonial protectionism that they had previously been, but that they also worked to open up international trade in a way that they thought would benefit the Global South. In the account offered here, the final decades of the 20th century therefore become a story of naivety and betrayal, as the left-wing peace movement found that the international organisations they had developed ‘unknowingly helped facilitate’ Western neoliberalism.

The book is, therefore, a work of restitution, self-consciously attempting to return the idea of free trade to its left wing, or perhaps more accurately radical liberal, roots. This is a welcome corrective, since free trade was such a central feature of the radical imagination in the 19th century. It was a key cog in a broader emancipatory vision which, while complicated by hostility to British imperialism, still looked to express a positive and harmonious view of humans’ social interactions, if only they could be freed from concentrations of power, whether of capital or the state. While focusing on the continuities, Pax Economica also inevitably charts the dissolution of this dream, and while Palen identifies the later decades of the 20th century as the key moment where that idealism was punctured, it had perhaps been deflating since the end of the 19th. A great deal of recent scholarship has explored the histories of late 20th century neoliberalism, linking open markets and human rights discourses with extractive neocolonialism. In this meticulously researched and comprehensive work, Palen offers not only an alternative pre-history to those narratives, but a conscious attempt to revive the alternative models of global cooperation—such as the fair-trade movement and Alter-Globalisation—that he fairly considers the true inheritors of the left-wing free trade and peace movement.

[1] American Federationist vol. 3, no. 10, (December, 1896), 224.

[2] William Graham Sumner, ‘Why I am a Free Trader’, Twentieth Century, 24 April, 1890 (William Graham Sumner Papers, MS 291, Ser. II, box 37, folder 1000, Yale University Special Collections)

[3] Michael Davitt to John D. Fitzgerald, quoted in Laurence Marley, Michael Davitt: Freeland Radical and Frondeur (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), 152.

[4] Edward Atkinson, Taxation and Work: A Series of Treatises on the Tariff and the Currency (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 104.

[5] ‘Rage against the Machine’, Time, 13 Dec., 1999.

[6] Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 153-154.

[7] Sven Beckert, ‘American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870-1950’, American Historical Review 122, no. 4, (2017): 1149.

[8] Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, The Working Class Movement in America [1891], Paul LeBlanc (ed.), (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), 135; Henry George, The Condition of Labor; An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, (New York: US Book Company, 1891), 80.

[9] Henry C. Carey, ‘The Harmony of Real Free Trade and the Discords of British Free Trade’, The Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil 4, no. 6, (1851): 21.

[10] J. A. Hobson, Toward International Government, (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 90.