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In November and December of 1999, at least forty thousand protestors descended on downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference. Some dressed as or brandished images of sea turtles, which symbolized the WTO’s overturning of environmental regulations against trawling. Alongside them marched representatives of the steelworkers’ unions, who protested the dumping of low-cost steel on United States markets. Also present were consumer groups opposing a WTO ruling that prevented Europe from restricting the import of hormone-treated beef. Green activists, blue-collar workers, and consumer advocates formed an eclectic alliance furious at the impact of the WTO’s enforcement of free trade on the environment and workers’ rights.
Over the course of several days, the “Battle of Seattle” shut down the city’s downtown core. Police, unprepared for the scale of the demonstrations, responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. WTO delegates couldn’t leave their hotel rooms, and opening ceremonies for the conference were postponed. Seattle mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency; Washington governor Gary Locke called in the national guard; trade talks collapsed.
For those who, like me, came of age politically at the end of the twentieth century, the WTO protests cemented “free trade” as a byword for environmental destruction and worker exploitation. The anti-globalization protests of 1999 look very different a quarter of a century later, when the economic and foreign policies of Donald Trump and now Joe Biden have both sought to overturn elements of the free trade order to gain a competitive advantage over China in the purported interests of American workers.
It is easy to forget that the Left has historically had a more ambivalent relationship to free trade. Pax Economica: Left-wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by University of Exeter historian Marc-William Palen, offers a corrective to dominant understandings of the views of the Left and Right on trade. Palen traces a left-wing tradition, dating to the 1840s, “that connected international cosmopolitanism with anti-imperialism and peace — and economic nationalism with imperialism and war.” Bringing together a dazzling (if sometimes overwhelming) array of activist networks, campaigners, and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present, the author reconstructs a history of economic thought that conceived of free trade as a necessary precondition for a fairer and more peaceful world.
Anti–Corn Law campaigners called for tariff reduction to lower food prices and boost competition and trade. These anti-protectionist arguments were embraced by a rising class of Victorian industrialists and manufacturers, concerned that higher food prices meant paying higher wages to workers. The struggle for free trade against the vested interests of the landowning class would shape the ideological foundations of Britain’s nineteenth-century Liberal Party. Through both informal and often violently enforced formal imperial expansion, Britain exported low tariffs throughout the nineteenth-century global economy.
While Britain promoted an “empire of free trade,” its imperial rivals and anti-colonial nationalist movements looked to protectionism. In the early nineteenth century, the United States raised tariffs on international trade and maintained high land prices as part of the “American System” of economic nationalism. In Germany, the economist Friedrich List argued that high tariffs were essential to nurture developing industries, a position advanced in his country’s own protectionist “National System.”
By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth these ideas had spread: anti-colonial nationalist campaigns, from the Indian “Swadeshi” movement to Ireland’s Sinn Fein, deployed boycotts and encouraged domestic production to promote economic self-sufficiency. During the interwar period W. E. B. Du Bois, influenced by protectionist German economics, developed a “pan-African Marxist/Listian framework” which promoted trade barriers for colonized states as a tool of resistance against European imperialism. For both rival empires and anti-colonial nationalists, protectionism and economic self-sufficiency offered tools of resistance to British imperial and economic domination.
In contrast to both the coercive nineteenth century “empire of free trade” and protectionist campaigns to resist it, Pax Economica delves into nineteenth-century political economy to recover a third socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist free trade tradition. While free trade may have been the gospel of nineteenth century liberalism, it was also embraced by its socialist critics. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose ideas were formed against the same protectionist background as Cobden’s critique of the Corn Laws, free trade was not a goal in itself, but “a progressive condition of industrial capitalism, moving it a step closer to socialist revolution.” Though the liberal radicals of the Manchester School sought a freer capitalism, and the socialist internationalists inspired by Marx and Engels sought its replacement, both traditions viewed free trade as a counterweight to nationalism and militant imperialism.
Over the course of several days, the “Battle of Seattle” shut down the city’s downtown core. Police, unprepared for the scale of the demonstrations, responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. WTO delegates couldn’t leave their hotel rooms, and opening ceremonies for the conference were postponed. Seattle mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency; Washington governor Gary Locke called in the national guard; trade talks collapsed.
For those who, like me, came of age politically at the end of the twentieth century, the WTO protests cemented “free trade” as a byword for environmental destruction and worker exploitation. The anti-globalization protests of 1999 look very different a quarter of a century later, when the economic and foreign policies of Donald Trump and now Joe Biden have both sought to overturn elements of the free trade order to gain a competitive advantage over China in the purported interests of American workers.
It is easy to forget that the Left has historically had a more ambivalent relationship to free trade. Pax Economica: Left-wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by University of Exeter historian Marc-William Palen, offers a corrective to dominant understandings of the views of the Left and Right on trade. Palen traces a left-wing tradition, dating to the 1840s, “that connected international cosmopolitanism with anti-imperialism and peace — and economic nationalism with imperialism and war.” Bringing together a dazzling (if sometimes overwhelming) array of activist networks, campaigners, and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present, the author reconstructs a history of economic thought that conceived of free trade as a necessary precondition for a fairer and more peaceful world.
Karl Marx Goes to Davos
Free trade was central to the Manchester School of nineteenth-century British political economy. Associated with the reformers Richard Cobden and John Bright, it challenged protectionist and mercantilist economic policies, most notably the Corn Laws that the Tory party implemented in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The Corn Laws imposed tariffs on imported grain, raising food prices and maintaining the value of agricultural land, which benefited a small and politically powerful aristocratic elite.Anti–Corn Law campaigners called for tariff reduction to lower food prices and boost competition and trade. These anti-protectionist arguments were embraced by a rising class of Victorian industrialists and manufacturers, concerned that higher food prices meant paying higher wages to workers. The struggle for free trade against the vested interests of the landowning class would shape the ideological foundations of Britain’s nineteenth-century Liberal Party. Through both informal and often violently enforced formal imperial expansion, Britain exported low tariffs throughout the nineteenth-century global economy.
While Britain promoted an “empire of free trade,” its imperial rivals and anti-colonial nationalist movements looked to protectionism. In the early nineteenth century, the United States raised tariffs on international trade and maintained high land prices as part of the “American System” of economic nationalism. In Germany, the economist Friedrich List argued that high tariffs were essential to nurture developing industries, a position advanced in his country’s own protectionist “National System.”
By the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth these ideas had spread: anti-colonial nationalist campaigns, from the Indian “Swadeshi” movement to Ireland’s Sinn Fein, deployed boycotts and encouraged domestic production to promote economic self-sufficiency. During the interwar period W. E. B. Du Bois, influenced by protectionist German economics, developed a “pan-African Marxist/Listian framework” which promoted trade barriers for colonized states as a tool of resistance against European imperialism. For both rival empires and anti-colonial nationalists, protectionism and economic self-sufficiency offered tools of resistance to British imperial and economic domination.
In contrast to both the coercive nineteenth century “empire of free trade” and protectionist campaigns to resist it, Pax Economica delves into nineteenth-century political economy to recover a third socialist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist free trade tradition. While free trade may have been the gospel of nineteenth century liberalism, it was also embraced by its socialist critics. For Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose ideas were formed against the same protectionist background as Cobden’s critique of the Corn Laws, free trade was not a goal in itself, but “a progressive condition of industrial capitalism, moving it a step closer to socialist revolution.” Though the liberal radicals of the Manchester School sought a freer capitalism, and the socialist internationalists inspired by Marx and Engels sought its replacement, both traditions viewed free trade as a counterweight to nationalism and militant imperialism.
