Thanks for joining us, Marc. Your book, Pax Economica, investigates historical left-wing movements—mostly from the late 19th century to the interwar years—that passionately supported free trade. Before we discuss those, I want to set the scene and ask you about the trends that these free traders fought against. On one hand, your first chapter surveys the rapidity with which economic nationalism spread, even among anti-colonial leaders. But on the other hand, that protectionist wave was itself only a response to the imperial free trade system established by the British Empire. Could you situate us a bit?
I suggest at the outset of the book that, for far too long, historians have given too much credit to the hegemonic power of the British during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Yes, Britain was the most industrially advanced. Yes, the British had the strongest navy. However, when the British unilaterally turned to free trade in 1846, they assumed that the rest of the industrializing world would follow their hegemonic lead once they saw the prosperity, food security, and peace dividends that the island-nation derived from trade liberalization. But from around 1870 onward, the opposite happened. Britain’s rivals instead embraced US-style “infant” industrial protectionism alongside colonial expansion to counteract British free-trade policies.
It is impossible to understand why free trade received so many adherents across the international political left without understanding the right-wing, imperial, protectionist world order that they were seeking to dismantle.
The “American System” of protectionism prevailed over most of the imperial world, not British-style free trade. The hegemonic influence of US protectionism superseded British free trade. By 1900, the US Empire’s model of economic nationalism, illiberal democracy (Jim Crow, anti-suffragism, immigration restrictions), and imperial market expansion became the preferred one for the empires of, say, Russia, France, Germany, and Japan. The politics of these imperial powers also shifted further to the nationalistic right as their empires grew. The subsequent imperial turn to retrenchment, economic nationalism, and self-sufficiency during the interwar years was merely a continuation of the illiberal trend that had begun over the prior half-century. This was not only how my book’s left-wing free traders viewed the world, it was also how the era’s right-wing economic nationalists understood it. It is impossible to understand why free trade received so many adherents across the international political left without understanding the right-wing, imperial, protectionist world order that they were seeking to dismantle.
Let us link that to contemporary politics. In a recent article, you argue that Trump’s barrage of global tariffs is “straight out of the GOP’s old protectionist playbook.” In what ways do Trump’s policies resemble what you call America’s 19th-century “closed-door empire”? Do you see any differences?
Trump’s love of tariffs, trade wars, imperial ambitions, and geopolitical conflict bears a remarkable resemblance to the GOP’s foreign policy from the late 19th century, the exact policy that US left-wing free traders attempted to thwart via peace and anti-imperial activism. Back then, the US was a protectionist nation, in which the Republican Party steered its economic nationalist course. The party of Lincoln, the party of antislavery, ended soon after the US Civil War, at which point it repositioned itself as the party of protectionism and Big Business. Republican imperial administrations oversaw the acquisition and maintenance of a colonial empire that included the Philippines, Hawai’i, and Puerto Rico. But the GOP’s preferred imperial weapons were informal, via tariffs and reciprocity (Trump’s other “favorite word”). In some cases, the GOP used these economic nationalist policies to coerce unwilling signatories like Cuba into trade arrangements that protected US domestic producers from unwanted competition while also allowing the US to exercise control over their finances.
“Tariff Man” Trump lionizes this protectionist period of the 1890s as a golden age, when in fact it was a Gilded Age: a time of extreme disparities of wealth, economic depression, and monopoly capitalism. Trump’s protectionist zero-sum worldview is explicitly drawing on this older GOP playbook.
At times, the GOP’s protectionist playbook even included tariffs to annex territory. For example, the Republicans tried to use the highly protectionist 1890 McKinley Tariff to annex Canada, an imperial plan that Trump has sought to revive. Indeed, “Tariff Man” Trump lionizes this protectionist period of the 1890s as a golden age, when in fact it was a Gilded Age: a time of extreme disparities of wealth, economic depression, and monopoly capitalism. Trump’s protectionist zero-sum worldview is explicitly drawing on this older GOP playbook.
Whereas Britain—the hegemon of the previous age—was the last nation to abandon free trade in the early 1930s, the USA—the hegemon of our age—was the first to abandon free trade following Trump’s 2016 election.
But, of course, herein lies the problem. Globalization is very different now. The world’s markets are vastly more interconnected, and supranational organizations like the WTO and the IMF now exist to regulate them. The technological marvels of transcontinental railways and the telegraph, as important as they were for accelerating late-nineteenth-century globalization, pale in comparison to those of, say, jet planes, the internet, and AI. Brazen imperial designs on territorial expansion are—or at least were, until very recently— out of fashion. Because the world is so different now, Trump’s returning the GOP to its nativist economic nationalist roots is sending protectionist shockwaves that are hitting America’s enemies and allies alike. The globalized world of today is not equipped to handle Trump’s old-fashioned protectionist vision. Another notable difference is that, whereas Britain—the hegemon of the previous age—was the last nation to abandon free trade in the early 1930s, the USA—the hegemon of our age—was the first to abandon free trade following Trump’s 2016 election.
Do you see the same “neo-mercantilist” impulse of Trump in other contemporary illiberal leaders? It is not difficult to hear protectionist rhetoric from people like Nigel Farage or Matteo Salvini, but some illiberal movements, like Narendra Modi’s BJP or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP Party, do seem more open to free trade. Even Farage used to excitedly talk about all the bilateral trade agreements the UK could sign after leaving the EU. Does trade play a more ambiguous role in far-right thinking today?
When the US, the post-Cold-War hegemon, abandoned multilateralism under the first Trump regime, it gave the green light to others, mostly on the political right, and signaled that out-and-out protectionism was “great again.” This strengthened the right-wing nationalist hands of, say, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Orbán in Hungary, as well as the illiberal politicians you have just mentioned, among many others. Of course, some illiberal right-wing movements, such as Brexit, were misleadingly couched as economically liberal by the likes of Farage. But it was clear to many who opposed Brexit, including myself, that leaving the EU was an illiberal project meant to placate nationalist forces wanting to “take back control” of UK immigration. Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister in 2016, summed up her party’s illiberal worldview when she famously stated that “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” It was also clear to most observers outside the pro-Brexit movement that leaving the single market would create substantial new trade barriers between the UK and the EU, by far its largest trading partner. And, being outside of the world’s largest free trade area rather than one of its leaders, the UK did not have a whole lot to offer to potential new trade partners. The UK’s looming recession and food insecurity today are a predictable consequence of the political and economic illiberalism of Brexit. From the British context, the far right duplicitously sold Brexit to some as a return of British free-trade hegemony, a “global Britain,” when, in reality, Brexit has left the UK largely isolated, irrelevant on the world stage, and gazing wistfully at the EU single market. After all, closed borders and free markets are like oil and water. So, I would probably prefer “duplicitous” or “delusional” to describe the far right’s thinking about trade, rather than “ambiguous.”
Your book discusses four kinds of left-wing free traders: radical liberals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christian peace activists. Interestingly, you demonstrate how this diverse group had certain influences in common, and shared in particular the influence of Richard Cobden and, to a lesser extent, Henry George. What were these figures’ ideas about trade and its relationship to peace?
These four groups of free traders covered the wide spectrum of the era’s political left-wing. Those closer to the center (the liberal radicals) sought to reform the capitalist system, while those farther left sought eventual revolution. But they all shared the belief that economic interdependence could create a more peaceful, equitable, democratic, and food-secure world. And this shared belief by and large drew ideological inspiration from Richard Cobden, the mid-nineteenth-century liberal radical leader of the British free trade movement. A more radical generation that spearheaded the left-wing free trade movement across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thereafter often also drew inspiration from the US political economist Henry George.
Left-wing free traders all shared the belief that economic interdependence could create a more peaceful, equitable, democratic, and food-secure world.
From the 1830s until he died in 1865, Cobden famously connected free trade to antislavery, anti-imperialism, peace, and food security. His ideology was known as Cobdenism, or Manchester liberalism, owing to Manchester’s role as the radical hub of the British free-trade movement. Cobden argued that freeing mankind from slavery and freeing world trade were two sides of the same coin. He believed that trade liberalization would naturally undo the illiberal economic policies of empires, leading to imperial devolution. He enunciated what in IR is referred to as capitalist peace theory or interdependence theory: that the free exchange of goods would create a more peaceful geopolitical climate. He also argued that free trade in foodstuffs would eradicate food insecurity. In the case of Britain, the Corn Laws—protective tariffs on foreign grain—were his main target. The Corn Laws, he persuasively argued, were pouring protectionist money into the private coffers of the country’s aristocratic landed elites at the expense of the country’s hungry masses. According to him, diluting the economic and political power of the atavistic and militaristic landed elites through free trade, in turn, would help democratize UK foreign policy. His left-wing disciples around the globe thereafter attempted to replicate his successes within their respective mercantilist empires.
In the US, one such disciple was Henry George, who embraced all the liberal tenets of Cobdenism in his internationally popular books Progress and Poverty (1879) and Protection or Free Trade (1886). But George focused most of his attention on the land problem. He argued that a single tax on the estimated value of land could undermine the economic power of land monopolies the world over, be they railroad tycoons, land speculators, the aristocratic masters of the Russian serf system, or the Prussian Junkers. But this direct form of land taxation also promised to provide all government revenues, making all other forms of direct and indirect taxation, including tariffs, unnecessary. So, for George and his disciples—known as Georgists or “single taxers”—their left-wing vision of free trade was even more extreme than Cobden’s, which associated free trade with low tariffs for revenue only. Uncoincidentally, under Georgist leadership, the international peace and anti-imperialist movements also became more radical by the time of the First World War.
These four movements and their views on trade clearly overlapped quite a bit, both in inspiration and personnel. However, in your telling, there were also clear divergences: they pursued different political strategies, they were motivated by different political concerns, and occupied different places in their respective political projects. Can you expand on this?
These left-wing groups believed that free trade would undermine the key economic causes of imperialism and war. It is this pacifistic free trade vision that tied them all together and underpinned their growing alliance.
Briefly, for liberal radicals like Cobden and George, a democratic free trade world was the pacifistic end goal in and of itself. For socialist internationalists, market interdependence was necessary for uniting the workers of the world as well as for eradicating the economic causes of war (tariff wars, sanctions, etc). A world united through socialist internationalism had no room for nationalist conflict, including economic nationalism. The feminist free-trade movement contained a bit of both the liberal radical and the socialist internationalist camps within its leadership. But more important for them were the food security and democratization dimensions. As the self-described “mothers of the world,” they were most concerned about how economic warfare—from protective tariffs to sanctions, embargoes, and world wars—created food insecurity for women and children, neither of whom had political rights throughout much of the world. Give women the right to vote, they argued, and peace and food security through free trade would follow. The Christian cosmopolitans similarly drew on a mixture of liberal radical and socialist internationalist ideological strands, but got more fired up by the millenarian Christian vision of a free trade world, wherein all of the planet’s raw materials, which God had purposefully spread across the globe, would be exchanged cheaply and peaceably, with world unity to follow. But all these left-wing groups believed that free trade would undermine the key economic causes of imperialism and war. It is this pacifistic free trade vision that tied them all together and underpinned their growing alliance.
In conclusion, I would like to ask about illiberalism, our program’s focus. How useful of a term do you think it is vis-à-vis your research? Pax Economica brings to light two systems of imperial free trading: that of the British empire and, more recently, neoliberalism. You demonstrate that both systems have been opposed by left-wing free traders on the basis of their militarism, lack of humanitarian concern, and democratic deficits. In other words, for the left, free trade is not enough: it must be pursued alongside a pacifist and more emancipatory program. In a way, your book’s protagonists see their main foes as conservatism and nationalism, regardless of whether they don a liberal or illiberal uniform. What do you think? For you, is the term “illiberalism” just another word for a nationalist conservatism, or is it something more?
I suppose we first need to differentiate between political and economic illiberalism. For “neoliberals” like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, they wanted to maintain free markets—economic liberalism—across the globe. But they became skeptical that democracies—especially left-leaning nationalist ones—were fit for purpose. So, they instead aligned themselves with politically illiberal right-wing democracies (e.g. Thatcher’s Britain, Reagan’s USA) and authoritarian states (e.g. Pinochet’s Chile and apartheid South Africa) to maintain the liberal economic order they preferred. Foreign interventionism in the name of free markets was also condoned, a coercive method of enforcement that my book’s left-wing free traders had long condemned. In other words, for right-wing neoliberals operating within the paranoid geopolitical climate of the Cold War, economic liberalism necessitated political illiberalism, however counterintuitive this might seem to us.
During the Cold War, “neoliberals” aligned themselves with politically illiberal right-wing democracies and authoritarian states to maintain the liberal economic order they preferred.
This was quite different from the left-wing free trade movement, which continued to promote democracy and non-interventionism throughout the Cold War. That is, it was able to keep its support for economic liberalism in pacifistic line with its defense of political liberalism. They also became more sympathetic to the short-term economic nationalist demands of the (mostly left-wing) decolonizing world. So, I think you are correct in your association, at least by the time of the Cold War. By then, “illiberalism” within the left-wing free trade tradition would have largely been ascribed to right-wing protectionist governments with authoritarian aspirations, of which there are a growing number these days, thanks in no small part to “Tariff Man” Trump.
Marc-William Palen is an Associate Professor in the Archaeology and History Department at the University of Exeter. He is the author of two books. Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024) was a New Yorker “Best Book We’ve Read This Year,” a Financial Times “Best Book of the Year,” and a Chicago Council on Global Affairs “Read of the Year.” His first book, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), was a Financial Times “Best Summer Books of 2016” and the Globalist magazine’s “Top Ten Books of 2016.” He is the founding editor of the Imperial & Global Forum and currently serves on the editorial boards of Diplomatic History and American Nineteenth Century History.
