When Leftists Were Free Traders
Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, by Marc-William Palen, Princeton University Press, 328 pages, $35
In 1845 the editor of the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant, traveled to England. In America, Bryant’s paper was famous for its radical support of free trade, free banking, international peace, and the abolition of slavery. In Europe, he was America’s most famous and accomplished poet—and a strong ally to Richard Cobden in the Anti–Corn Law League’s war to bring down the price of bread by rolling back tariffs.
The movement against the Corn Laws was reaching a fever pitch: a tipping point toward free trade and peace in the world’s premier empire, with repercussions that could ripple around the globe. The next year, Prime Minister Robert Peel buckled under the pressure and Parliament repealed the hated trade barriers. Free traders gained their greatest victory to date, Britons got their cheap bread, and—with the globalizing power of the telegraph at hand—radical liberals felt like they were poised to sweep humanity into a new age of peace and prosperity.
Meanwhile, a counterrevolution was brewing. One of America’s overlooked contributions to intellectual history and world history is the nationalist-protectionist economic system developed by Friedrich List and popularly called “the American System.” Listian economics became the Whig Party platform, calling for public works, a national bank, and high protective tariffs. The Listian nationalists argued that the United States should pursue economic independence to maintain its security against the British juggernaut. Many others who were arrayed against British power copied the Americans.
Here we have the central set of intellectual and political conflicts that set the stage for Marc-William Palen’s timely and important new volume, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. This book fluidly combines intellectual, social, political, and world history, seamlessly transitioning across borders to show how ideas and interests intersect and collide.
Though the story has many elements, its heart is a movement “for free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace.” This broad movement’s members included early libertarians, Georgist land taxers, Marxists, feminists, Christian radicals, and others. “Left-leaning liberal radical reformers such as Richard Cobden, Henry George, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Norman Angell, Abe Isoo, J.A. Hobson, Jane Addams, Rosika Schwimmer, and Fanny Garrison Villard,” Palen writes, “connected free trade with democracy promotion, antislavery, universal suffrage, civil rights, prosperity, anti-imperialism, and peace.” They were, he says, a “motley crew of left-wing free traders” who spearheaded an early, good-natured version of globalism.
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The phrases left-wing and free traders are not often conjoined today. “The past couple of decades have witnessed a flurry of scholarship tracing the right-wing orig
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