Few conflicts have shaped modern mass political debate and mobilization more than the rivalry of free trade and neomercantilism. Yet the intellectual history of this conflict is underdeveloped. Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica offers a major addition to a small yet growing body of scholarship on the intellectual history of trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by resurrecting a forgotten tradition of mobilization for freer trade among left and left-liberal intellectuals and activists.[1] He paints a vivid tableau of debate among well-known figures in the history of trade, such as the British politicians and campaigners Richard Cobden and Norman Angell, and the less familiar, including the Japanese Christian pacifist Toyohiko Kagawa and radical US feminist Florence Kelley, to show how a simple yet powerful idea circulated around the world: that protectionism made the world less equal and more violent.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 16-39
Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. Princeton University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780691199320.
19 May 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-39 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Diane Labrosse
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany S. Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Jamie Martin, Harvard University. 2
Review by Martin Conway, University of Oxford. 6
Review by David Ekbladh, Tufts University. 9
Review by Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva and New York University. 13
Review by Francine McKenzie, Western University, Ontario. 16
Introduction by Jamie Martin, Harvard University
Few conflicts have shaped modern mass political debate and mobilization more than the rivalry of free trade and neomercantilism. Yet the intellectual history of this conflict is underdeveloped. Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica offers a major addition to a small yet growing body of scholarship on the intellectual history of trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by resurrecting a forgotten tradition of mobilization for freer trade among left and left-liberal intellectuals and activists.[1] He paints a vivid tableau of debate among well-known figures in the history of trade, such as the British politicians and campaigners Richard Cobden and Norman Angell, and the less familiar, including the Japanese Christian pacifist Toyohiko Kagawa and radical US feminist Florence Kelley, to show how a simple yet powerful idea circulated around the world: that protectionism made the world less equal and more violent.
Like any political concept, “free trade” is riddled with tensions. What did it mean, say, for a free trading imperialist in the British Empire, who praised its pacifying effects while defending its enforcement at gunpoint in places like India and China? And how could anticolonial visions of trade, which gained steam after the First World War, be squared with the ambitions of postcolonial states to jumpstart their development with protections? By focusing on debates like these, Palen unsettles common associations of free trade with the right or the neoliberal center, showing how, for example, it was an important socialist cause before the dawn of the Cold War. He even suggests the existence of a long-lost “Marx-Manchester” synthesis (93), which was once so tight that to be labeled a free trader, such as during the first US Red Scare in 1919–20, could be tantamount to being called a Bolshevik.
Palen’s book is full of bold arguments and unexpected details, from the tracts of anarchist free traders in Meiji Japan to Georgist designs for the boardgame that eventually became Monopoly.[2]It leaves the reader with the distinct feeling that the twenty-first century is weighed heavily by unresolved political questions from the nineteenth about the relationship of globalization and war, the effects of freer trade on domestic equality and distributional conflict, and the uses of tariffs for both developmentalist and reactionary political projects. The resurgence of old neomercantilist ideas in the 2020s, particularly on the right, Palen concludes, has left an opening for the return of equally old left visions of a “free trade world.” And so the conflict continues.
All four reviewers in this roundtable agree that Palen’s book is empirically rich and deeply researched, perspectival-shifting, and timely. David Ekbladh emphasizes the complexity and sophistication of the worldviews of the protagonists Palen uncovers, including pacifists who espoused deep understandings of the relationship of military power and economics. He also praises Palen for casting a staple figure of US mid-twentieth-century history, the Tennessee politician and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, in new light, which shows how Hull unexpectedly acquired a mass following, ultimately winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Palen argues that far from being a “contrivance to mask hegemony,” as Ekbladh puts it, US free traderism at the end of the Second World War had a deep well of support among a broad coalition of political activists and social movements.
Francine McKenzie similarly praises the diversity of voices in Palen’s work, its global reach, and the complexity of its depiction of the “sticky concept” of free trade. She also poses a series of queries for the book’s protagonists: how did they actually think lowering tariffs would, in practice, translate into emancipatory politics; and what made them optimistic about the prospects for a cause that had a relatively poor track record? She also emphasizes, as Palen agrees, that rediscovering the anti-imperialism of some free traders does not make free trade imperialism any less valid an analytic concept. McKenzie suggests a valuable point of departure for further research which involves an equivalently broad intellectual history of protectionism, which was not only a foil for free traders, but itself a cause that inspired many different movements and political actors. Here, the recent work of Eric Helleiner is key.[3]
Sandrine Kott similarly emphasizes the important contributions Pax Economica makes to the study of internationalisms and peace movements. She adds further complexity to the story by showing how the Soviet bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) adopted free trade ideas during the Cold War. A similar point has recently been made by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, who argues that Soviet leaders mobilized market ideas against the protectionist and market-distorting policies of their Western rivals.[4] Kott also suggests that a study which draws on other European contexts (as well as on Catholic thinkers as much as Protestants) could offer an important complement to Palen’s story, which is largely rooted in Anglo-American ideas and their global dissemination.
Martin Conway agrees that Palen’s work forces us to rethink assumptions about free trade ideas serving simply as a cloak for narrow economic or geopolitical interests, or as a “lost cause espoused by a fringe of naïve liberal groups.”At the same time, Conway also points to the challenges faced by globally-focused intellectual histories. He notes that as much as showing what united otherwise very different writers, it is equally important to consider the specific and context-bound nature of their political aims. The dissemination of free trade ideas, as Palen’s book shows, was itself driven by “Western globalization.” But these ideas took on lives of their own as they intersected with an array of political causes—from Indian independence to Chinese Nationalism to interwar US feminism.
These rich suggestions for future research and debate, and Palen’s response to his reviewers, all speak to the ambition and vision of Pax Economica—and to the importance of the story it tells for the politics of our own time.
Contributors:
Marc-William Palen is a historian at the University of Exeter. He is editor of The Imperial & Global Forum and co-director of History & Policy’s Global Economics and History Forum in London. His newest book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024) was named one of Financial Times’ “best books of 2024” and made the New Yorker’s 2024 “best books” list. He is also author of The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Jamie Martin is Assistant Professor of History and of Social Studies at Harvard University. He is a historian of international political economy, empire, and the world wars. His book, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard, 2022), received the 2023 World History Association Connected Book Award and the 2023 Transatlantic Studies and Cambridge University Press Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2023 Susan Strange Best Book Prize. He is now writing a history of the world economy during the First World War. His public writing has appeared in The New York Times, London Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, n+1, and Bookforum.
Martin Conway is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of a number of works on different aspects of the history of twentieth-century Europe, including Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton University Press, 2020), which has also appeared in an Italian translation: L’età della democrazia (Carocci, 2023).
David Ekbladh is Professor of History and core faculty in International Relations at Tufts University. His books include, Beyond 1917: The United States and the Global Legacies of the Great War (with Thomas Zeiler and Benjamin Montoya, Oxford University Press, 2017), The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton University Press, 2010), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, and Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2022).
Sandrine Kott is a full Professor of Modern European History at the University of Geneva and Visiting Professor at New York University. She has studied History in Paris, the University of Bielefeld, (FRG), and Columbia University (New York). Her main fields of expertise are the history of social welfare and labor in France and Germany since the end of the nineteenth century and labor (and power) relations in those countries of real socialism, in particular in the German Democratic Republic. In Geneva she has developed the transnational and global dimensions of each of her fields of expertise by taking advantage of the archives and resources of international organizations and particularly of the International Labor Organization. She has initiated in 2009 the History of International Organizations Network, a collaborative online research platform and seminar series http://www.hion.ch/.
Francine McKenzie is a Professor of History at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Rebuilding the Postwar Order: Peace, Security and the UN-System, 1941–1948 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-editor of Dominion of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History (University of British Columbia Press, 2017). She is in the early stages of two projects, one on the discourse of peace in the 1940s and another on tensions between the conception and practice of international trade and liberal theories.
Review by Martin Conway, University of Oxford
This is a book that is large in both scope and ambition. With this account of progressive support for global free trade across almost two centuries from the 1840s to the present day, Marc-William Palen proposes a new narrative of the origins of our present. As such, his purpose is to disrupt and re-frame more familiar accounts which have focused on the rise of Western empires, world wars, and capitalist globalization.[5] As Palen argues, these narratives have unduly marginalized the issue of free trade, presenting it as little more than a tool of self-interested state and commercial actors, or as a lost cause espoused by a fringe of naïve liberal groups. In contrast, his core thesis is that campaigns for global free trade were an important force in their own right, and formed a central element of a wider progressive vision of how a better world could be brought into being.
Starting from Richard Cobden’s campaigns against the Corn Laws in the mid-nineteenth century, Palen traces in six chronological chapters the numerous vicissitudes as well as the obstinate endurance of the cause of free trade across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the early decades of the twentieth century, free trade formed part of a set of progressive causes, including global disarmament, hostility to imperial repression, and the defense of women’s rights, which were espoused by “a radical cosmopolitan pacifistic alliance of capitalists, socialists, feminists, and Christians” (50). The high hopes of the global moment of 1919 were, however, soon dashed, and the advocates of free trade struggled to make their voices heard in the ferocious Darwinian competition for markets and the vital resources of food, fuel, and metals engaged in by states and empires across the subsequent three decades.
With the defeat of fascism in 1945, the way seemed finally open to a more united and integrated world; but once again this optimism proved to be illusory. The Cold War marked a return to protectionist trading blocs of east and west, reinforced by the emerging conflict between the developed economies and the global South. Decolonizing states rejected free trade as a device of invasive global capitalism, seeking instead to develop their own economies behind protectionist barriers. At the same time, Western Europe and North America did much the same, by demanding access to southern markets, while limiting the opportunities for producers in Africa and Asia to sell their goods in the protected markets of Western Europe and North America. The espousal of neo-liberalism by political groups and governments in the final decades of the twentieth century marked a resurgence of a radical rhetoric of free trade. But, in doing so, it was transformed into the language of the market economy, and of a tool of rapacious capitalist interests. As a consequence, the malleable concept of fair trade has instead become in the twenty-first century the rallying cry of anti-globalization campaigners opposed to free-trade agreements, and the associated ills of industrial delocalization and environmental destruction.[6]
This is therefore anything but a story of simple success. Free trade has rarely stood alone; instead it has been a cause embraced at different times by different people, and has often been crudely instrumentalized by the interests of states and powerful interest groups. Palen’s point, however, is to demonstrate that, for all of its reverses, this fundamentally progressive vision of a world of peaceful trade, across national and imperial boundaries, has been a durable facet of the emergence of modernity that historians have too often underestimated. There may never have been a moment of decisive victory; but the energy that a wide range of activists invested in the cause of free trade was both important in itself, and served as a rallying point for a wide range of actors who are all too often confined to the footnotes of other narratives.
In achieving that goal, the book is emphatically successful. The author has read very widely in the primary campaigning literature, as well as in a range of secondary historiographies, in order to present a narrative that moves confidently across time and space, while also diving in convincing detail into the particularities of individual campaigners and organizations within the longer narrative. All of this makes it a considerable achievement. But, for all of the richness of its detail, it does not entirely convince that free trade was the golden thread by which we can make sense of a wider history of progressive thought across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Indeed, the global scope of this book, ranging from East Asia and Europe to North America, serves to demonstrate how context-specific the concept of free trade was. The advocates of free-trade ideas often sought to legitimize their campaigns with reference to particular key figures, notably Cobden, who was invoked in a bewildering range of contexts. But the uses they made of these ideas were highly diverse. In that sense, free trade was a means of rallying against the evils of protectionist reaction, but rarely achieved a more positive definition of its purpose. More often than not, it meant different things to people in different places; a reality which Palen’s primarily intellectual-history methodology, with its emphasis on the similarities of language between thinkers and organizations, tends to efface. His analysis in his principal chapters of the anti-imperialists of the pre-1914 years, the feminist groups of the inter-war years, and radicals in the global South demanding access in the 1950s and 1960s to the markets of their former imperial rulers demonstrates the cross-pollination between the rhetoric of these diverse voices. But, for all of that, their points of departure, and their end goals, remained very different. In that sense, Palen’s book risks at times becoming a giant historical Venn diagram, which highlights the points of convergence between different causes in their support for free trade, while neglecting the other dimensions of the diagram.
It is also inevitable that when presented with the interconnections between these diverse individuals and groups, the reader begins to think of those who are not present on Palen’s map. Palen’s narrative is impressively inclusive in his engagement with American, European, and British campaigners for free trade, as well as the resonances their actions found in different imperial territories, and in the Far East; but, as is often the case with such exercises in global history, its focus is primarily on the Anglosphere. This is a book which emphatically speaks and reads in English. The majority of thinkers and campaigners included here worked through English as their primary language, and the considerable secondary bibliography is composed exclusively of works published in English or in English translations. This creates some obvious inequalities. The treatment of Protestant Christian ideas is, for example, much more substantial than the engagement with Catholic writers and thinkers, many of whom regarded free trade and its associated evils of liberal individualism as the antithesis of a just social and economic order.[7] Palen also pays little attention to the case of France, which over the course of the nineteenth century proved to be much less permeable to a belief in the universal benefits of free trade. For many French liberals of the nineteenth century, advocacy of an internal free market, which would maximize the productive capacity of French farmers and industrialists, went hand in hand with support for a rational tariff regime which would protect them from the rapacious ambitions of British and, subsequently, American producers.[8]
This is therefore a book which provokes reflection more than it convinces. By focusing on free trade as a progressive idea, it obliges historians, who are influenced by a present-day culture of pervasive distrust of the exploitative logics of global capitalism, to reflect on the ways in which free trade was for a long time a language of individual and collective emancipation: a means by which individuals and societies could liberate themselves from the three-fold constraints imposed by oppressive state power, imperial regimes, and established material interests. But that dream of a free-trade world was neither unchanging nor universal. As Palen’s analysis makes clear, it acquired its initial definition in the particular milieux and intellectual contexts of the Atlantic and European worlds of the nineteenth century, before assuming a more global resonance over the course of the twentieth century. Yet, for all of its subsequent adaptability, the concept of free trade remained rooted in a Western logic of economic and political thought, with its emphasis on core themes of material progress and individual initiative. That did not prevent it from acquiring advocates and allies in other areas of the world, including in the global South. But, as Palen’s book well demonstrates, its history is inseparable from the larger history of western globalization.
Review by David Ekbladh, Tufts University
We’ve entered an era of discontinuity. The conventional wisdom asserts that orders are falling, political coalitions are shifting, and old assumptions are no longer solid, melting under intensifying geopolitical pressures. Even historians have felt this shift, pronouncing the dominant economic concept of this wheezing era, neoliberalism, finished.[9]
Nevertheless, history also offers continuities. With anxieties have come policies that do bode the end of neoliberalism: growing emphasis on “industrial policy” (what some once might just have called “planning”) or increasingly nationally focused trade policies.[10] Leading among these is a return of tariffs, sometimes as political theater, other times for actual geopolitical ends.[11] All these nationalistic agendas cut against long-chanted neoliberal mantras about free trade and open markets. Worries that free trade is breaking down and the world economy is breaking up are not just the worries of mad academic or think-tank scribblers but mainstream media outlets.[12]
In a moment that is set upon by a fear that regimes of free trade are being deposed, Marc-William Palen’s new book arrives, with its illuminating and enlivening historical perspective. This rich book suggests that the concern about the breakdown of free trade might actually touch on traditional concerns, not just of the corporate right but also the traditions of the progressive left.
This is where Palen’s book is not just a counterpoint in this debate. Like all first-rate scholarship should, this book asks us to reconsider larger issues. A serious commitment to free trade concerns not just the editors at The Economist, the corporate crew at Davos, C-suite scribes like Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times, or reflexive conservative politicians and policy wonks.[13] Faith in free trade has long cut across a wide cross section of the Western and international intellectual and policy community that would have self-identified as people of the left. It is not just the centrists who have tilted left on this question, but even more radical voices: socialists, pacifists, feminists, Christian activists—a list that surely is not mutually exclusive.
To trace the vibrant and long-term debate over the value of free trade to peace and (a term the author does not highlight) justice, Palen again leans on some of the authors, particularly the German-American protectionist economist Friedrich List and the pro-free trade British politician Richard Cobden, whose positions framed the author’s valuable first book.[14] Palen sees their ideas and others as having set a debate about the usefulness of free trade early as the 1840s. This then coursed through the thought of many mainstream thinkers, groups, and issues on the international left. This was not just mainstream liberal groups like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, but the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and even the Young Men’s Christian Association. Here his book is not just about thinkers, but the movements and institutions they inspired and the policies they then supported. Although there was wide variation among the positions of these actors, their commitment to free trade often meant support for market-based exchange that was not fettered by unreasonable tariffs.
Palen’s work reminds us that the views of pacifists, anti-imperialists, socialists, Christian activists and many others who self-consciously saw themselves on the left were wide-ranging and that they saw their primary issues as bound up in the larger bundle of issues that make up global affairs. A critical component was always free trade, which many of these groups saw not as inflammatory but as a salve to the injustices and problems they were confronting. Along the way he does a service, reminding historians that many groups that are casually dismissed as single issue—e.g. pacifists—actually had sophisticated understandings of how the world fit together.[15] This often meant they understood how economic elements contributed to the world’s problems and often saw free trade as mechanism to solve those problems. Here Palen offers a welcome reminder that these species of left-wing groups should be seen by scholars, as well as by anyone engaged in global affairs today, as having been part of the larger international affairs debates of their times.
Palen’s encompassing work also makes the appeal of these policies among politicians, policymakers, and also the public legible while at the same time sorting out some long-standing mysteries. With tongue a bit in cheek I will say that Palen provided this reader a sense of why the seemingly dry Secretary of State Cordell Hull had such a devoted following in his day. Sure, there was his “Hull Trade Program” of reciprocal trade agreements that were meant to rehabilitate world trade after the shocks of the 1930s. However, that hardly seems the stuff to render a rather old (by the standards of his time) Tennessee politician and already long-serving Secretary of State a figure of adulation. Yet left-of-center figures mounted a “draft Cordell Hull” campaign with the aim of having him run in the 1940 election rather than Franklin Roosevelt. It came to nothing, but it was a sign of his real popularity. He even received a Nobel Prize.[16]
Palen’s larger argument helps sort this out, explaining that while strategists and economists might have liked efforts in reciprocal trade agreements, Hull backers were not just a crude crowd of those scheming for an American Century and global dominance. These ideas also resonated with left-of-center activists, who were themselves committed to peaceful liberal free trade in an era when such trade seemed to be decisively threatened by militant autarky. At that tense moment, the commitment to free trade of the sort championed by Hull could again be seen by supporters on the left as a tool against aggression and imperialism. For these folks, this was not a contrivance to mask hegemony. The hope that a certain type of trade could foster peace, prosperity and harmony was another long continuity in the left-wing circles that Palen traces. Indeed, Hull’s efforts to restart the world economy on free-trade principles was not a co-optation of established leftist positions. Since his efforts grew out of these longstanding debates, it is fair to say they were in certain ways a product of them.
Nevertheless, while the book successfully draws out continuities, it can be weaker on change. There are points at which the narrative does flatten the diverse elements that intersected with issues trade and the world economy for many of these left-wing groups. While many constituencies had a plank for free trade in their agendas and for thinking about world affairs, at times their ultimate goals were different. The means to those ends could be as well. Many of the groups that sought peace and/or were opposed to colonialism in the years after the Great War were attracted to or fell back on the state and the interrelated concept of state planning in order to provide reform to the global commons. This became particularly pressing after the upheavals that were brought by another generation’s laissez-faire in the form of the Great Depression. Many of these groups hoped that the rationalism or simply the regulatory power of planning could also work on the world stage and improve trading conditions.[17]
A sense of the importance of the state (and sometimes international organizations) in not only channeling but promoting economic activity found expression in a growing commitment to international (as well as domestic) development. Many organizations, including a long roster among the sorts of left-ish groups Palen discusses, were not just supporters of the concept. In the decades before and after World War II they sent people into the field to actually do development. To reverse a conservative catch phrase, there was a broad belief that “Aid Not Trade” was needed to foster the economic advancement of poorer and post-colonial states. Very simply put, after these places had developed they could trade more effectively and beneficially. Trade alone, often done under the veil of empire, had not and likely would not lead to economies that could take the fullest advantage of a free trade world. After 1945, with the lingering legacy of the Depression and with powerful statist examples in the Communist bloc, there were assumptions across the left and center that through the power of planning the state could produce the sort of economic progress that the free market and free trade had failed to do.[18]
After World War II, a swath of progressive groups, be they religious or secular, put stock in development. Although there were significant differences in the extremes of these plans, many non-state groups of all types were perfectly comfortable with state led development and industrialization. Indeed, one way that parties of the right came to own “free trade” is that they contrasted international investment based on private enterprise (at least rhetorically) against statist industrial and economic plans that restricted what they saw as the truest expression of how an unfettered market brought the benefits of actual “free trade.”[19]
This mild critique overlaps with one of the most valuable parts of Palen’s argument: that it was the Cold War and beyond that created a new set of perceptions of trade along the ideological spectrum. This did not erase the left’s interest in seeing trade—recast as it was in the 1990s as “fair” (a concept that would find connections to the development vogue of “microcredit”)—as a means for those on the left to find solutions to the problems that were facing humanity.[20]
In a book as trim and yet as full as Palen’s is, criticisms are less blows to its central argument than a recognition that Pax Economica has shifted our understanding of something as big as world trade and what many hoped it might achieve. It shakes up some ossified interpretations of the basic elements of how we discuss the global economy and knocked open new terrain for research and debate. There is much to recommend in Palen’s book and much more for other historians to pick up and explore.
Review by Sandrine Kott, University of Geneva and New York University
This book provides an intellectual history of economic free trade, highlighting the link that certain groups have established between free trade, anti-imperialism, global prosperity and peace. In so doing, it provides a welcome corrective to some of the historiography of free trade, which places particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on its economic liberal inspirations.[21] To this end, Marc-William Palen gives voice to four intellectual traditions and/or political movements within which positions in favor of free trade were formulated between 1850 and 1950: radical liberalism, the Marxist/socialist tradition, feminism, and Christianity. In the final chapter, he shows how these four groups and traditions have recombined since the 1970s to defend a free-trade position that is not to be confused with that of the neoliberals.
In my view, the strength and interest of the book lies in this choice. By focusing on these four milieus, Palen is able to reconstruct the diversity of actors and motivations of the movements defending Pax Economica. This allows him to highlight the links between the defense of economic peace and other international social and economic reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, social justice, civil rights, the Esperanto movement, and the New International Economic Order” (8).
In this sense, the book is a very welcome contribution to the rich historiography on the various internationalisms, to which it adds numerous elements.[22] One of these is the interesting Protestant/evangelical justification of free trade as a divine law inscribed in the natural order of the world. However, given that the Protestant churches in the US and England are powerful economic players, I wonder to what extent these positions were not also inspired by economic motives. Overall, it might have been useful to place these pro-free trade discourses more precisely in their social and economic context, and to focus on those who are the winners and/or victims of free trade: in particular, the workers whose voices we might try to capture through trade union programs and discourses.[23]
Palen traces the development of these movements for economic peace over time, from their origins in the mid-nineteenth century to their contemporary manifestations since the “neoliberal turn” (in the final chapter), with particular emphasis on the period 1850 to 1950. This allows him to observe how the ideas of free trade were adapted and reinterpreted by different generations of activists and intellectuals. He shows that the movement reached a kind of apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was reflected in the creation of organizations such as the League of Nations.
After the rise of economic nationalism between the wars, belief in the benefits of regulated free trade led to the Bretton-Woods system and the creation of organizations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the United Nations Trade and Development organization (UNCTAD), and, to some extent, the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. During this period, he argues that their establishment was thwarted by Cold War opposition and the US government’s use of economic embargoes against countries run by Communist parties. At the same time, progressive free traders in Europe, who continued to advocate free trade as an instrument of peace and global redistribution, now favored the regional framework. Since the 1970s, this tradition has been reconfigured in the face of the neoliberal trend toward deregulation. Leftist free-trade circles try to distinguish themselves by insisting on the maintenance of an ideal of pacifism and global justice, of which the fair trade movement may seem to be an expression.
The book also highlights the ambiguities and contradictions of the free trade movement. Beyond the assumed imperialist or neo-colonial dimension of free trade, it also recounts the debates that raged within the circles it examines. The book convincingly discusses how the free-trade argument was mobilized to justify colonial expansion as well as to oppose it. While imperial powers, especially Great Britain, often imposed free-trade policies on their colonies to serve their own economic interests, progressive proponents of free trade emphasized that, when applied fairly and equitably, free trade could contribute to the emancipation of colonized or recently decolonized peoples. However, the author also shows that economic nationalism was claimed by the anticolonial movement as a tool to achieve real independence. Since the 1960s, the dependency theory (dependencia), of which the Argentinean Raúl Prebisch is one of the best-known representatives, has also emphasized that free trade encourages neocolonialism in the face of trade imbalances. In this respect, it would have been interesting to recall the Eastern European origins of this position during the interwar period, as they inspired Latin American dependency economists after 1945. Similarly, the deliberately free-trade stance of the Soviet Bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) could have provided an interesting counterpoint to the positions of the Anglo-American actors studied in the book.[24]
Overall, actors from the global South and those from non-British Europe, especially Central and Southern Europe, are largely absent from the book. It offers an intellectual history based on a corpus written almost entirely in English and a history of progressive free trade movements that were centered on Britain and the United States. This is particularly true of the two chapters on feminists and Christians (mainly Protestants), as well as the last chapter. In the early chapters, which also cover other European countries, especially Germany and France, the literature cited is almost exclusively by English-speaking authors. Historians from these countries have, however, produced a wealth of literature on the topics covered and especially (but the same could be said for other topics) on List and the Historische Schule der Nationalökonomie which should not be confused with the German Historical School (or Historische Rechtsschule).[25]
Drawing on this very rich literature would have been a commitment to a progressive intellectual “free trade” and would have enriched the argumentation of the book. In this regard, and beyond the famous social encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII, which is briefly mentioned (162), it would have been interesting to know more about the position of social Catholics in Europe, especially in Germany, France, and Italy, and also the way in which Catholic liberation theology approached the question of free trade. I am well aware that it is impossible to cover everything and that choices have to be made, but in this case one would hope that they would be made explicit and justified from the outset. This in no way detracts from the interest of the book and its contribution to an Anglo-American history of progressive currents in favor of free trade.
Review by Francine McKenzie, Western University, Ontario
Pax Economica is a deeply insightful, impressively researched, and elegantly written exploration of the scope, complexity, and persistence of left-wing visions of free trade from the 1840s to the 1940s. Palen moves across Europe and North America, with some discussion of other parts of the world, including China, Japan, and Turkey; covers a century; and connects a “motley crew” (4) of free trade activists that included pacifists, champions of women’s rights, socialists, and opponents of empires. He situates three thinkers at the start and core of the “commercial peace movement” (5): Richard Cobden, a British manufacturer and Liberal politician, Henry George, an American journalist and political economist, and Norman Angell, a British journalist, Labour politician, and public intellectual on international affairs. Their ideas about trade, tariffs, taxes, and interdependence had so much influence that Palen elevates their main messages to “isms”: Cobdenism, Georgism, and Angellism. Equally important are their disciples, an eclectic group that includes Leo Tolstoy (Russian novelist), Jane Addams (American social reformer and peace activist), W. E. B. Du Bois (American sociologist, civil rights and anti-racism activist), Emily Green Balch (American economist and peace activist), Albert Einstein (German-born theoretical physicist), Florence Nightengale (British pioneer of modern nursing), M. K. Gandhi (Indian lawyer, civil rights activist, and leader of Indian independence movement) and Sun Yat-sen (Chinese revolutionary and statesman), all of whom are well known, but probably not as free trade advocates.[26]
Pax Economica makes important contributions to peace history and the history of economic ideas.[27] Integrating free trade into peace history fills in the meaning of peace. Left-wing visionaries opposed wars, militarism, and nationalism, and in different combinations and to different degrees, imperialism, the exploitation of labor, class conflict, racism, violence, restrictive immigration policies, hunger, poverty, and authoritarianism. Similarly, free trade was not a rigid doctrine but a sticky concept—Palen calls it a “cosmopolitan cocktail” (121)—to which a belief-system was attached that endorsed democracy, freedom, equality, and plenty. The left-wing free trade advocates were not economists for the most part, but they understood economic ideas as moral philosophy and were committed to making the world a better place.
Although I have learned a lot from Pax Economica, I am left wanting to know more, especially about why the free trade champions believed that free trade was a progressive force. What and how would free trade change or make possible? In light of evidence to the contrary, how did their confidence in free trade survive? Some of the supporting cast were related to one another, started movements together, and corresponded. Did they constitute a network? Did they actually see themselves as part of a commercial peace movement?
Many people in Palen’s study are familiar from different contexts and historical literatures, such as social reform, opposition to imperialism, and the women’s rights movement.[28] Their ideas about free trade are fascinating and instructive, but making free trade central to their beliefs, principles and work might be a distortion. For example, Palen describes Tolstoy as a “Russian Georgist” (100). Palen’s evidence that Tolstoy supported Henry George’s ideas about taxation is convincing. But does this descriptor exaggerate the importance of free trade, and thus displace Tolstoy’s Christian beliefs, pacifism, and support for anarchy? Or did his adherence to Georgism upend or destabilize other long-held beliefs? Along the same lines, is the influence of free trade overstated when Palen claims that President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points were “Manchester School-inspired” (107)?
Palen’s left-wing believers in free trade equated protectionism with nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and war. Although free trade and protection are often positioned as mutually exclusive and antagonistic, the dynamic is complicated because the two schools of thought had so much variety within them, were internally inconsistent, and sometimes overlapped. The left-wing visionaries’ understanding of protectionism was a construction and a useful foil. It would be unreasonable to expect Palen to write about the complexities of protectionist thinking to the same extent as left-wing free trade visionaries (although he does examine economic nationalism in chapter 1), but it would be helpful to be reminded that the protectionist specter was both real and instrumental, and that protectionist logic was complicated and understandable.[29] Furthermore, the faith of left-wing visionaries in the benevolent transformative power of free trade should have been contrasted, and thereby problematized, with the association of free trade with war, conquest, and exploitation. The left-wing visionaries did not own free trade. While Palen’s argument that there was an anti-imperialist version of free trade is convincing, it does not obliterate the imperialism of free trade or jettison the anxieties that free trade elicited. Palen foreshadows this twist and complexity when he explains in the introduction that protection emerged as an “emancipatory weapon of independence” (10). He explores this more fully in the final chapter, but it would have been less jarring if the connection between free trade, imperialism, violence, and injustice had been woven across the 1840–1940 period.
Although Palen describes his study as Euro-American centric (10), he discusses the views of anti-colonial nationalists and explains how they adapted free trade ideas to suit local conditions. This important insight complements Eric Helleiner’s recent book, The Contested World Economy,[30] which tracks the global circulation and deployment of economic ideas. In light of Palen and Helleiner’s work, we need to rethink explanations for Euro-American centrism. Rather than explain in it terms of an “imbalanced dissemination of economic ideologies during this era of western-dominated colonialism, globalization and industrialization” (10), it might be that English-language scholarship has more work to do. This is a collective endeavor, and not something a single historian can fix, although Palen has certainly contributed to it.
In the final chapter, Palen discusses the perilous state of left-wing visions of free trade since 1945 in response to the new threats of neoliberalism, neomercantilism and neocolonialism. I appreciate Palen’s explanation that the left-wing visions of free trade paved the way for neoliberalism. History is full of unintended consequences. Nonetheless, I wondered if these threats are new. They seem to be a continuation of free trade-protectionist debates, with some new features.
Palen is a forward-looking historian who cautiously raises the possibility of the restoration of “left-wing globalist dreams of Pax Economica” (222) as the successor to neoliberalism. I am not sure, but the better, fairer, and gentler world that so many left-wing visionaries wanted is as necessary today as it has ever been.
Response by Marc-William Palen, University of Exeter
I am grateful to Martin Conway, David Ekbladh, Sandrine Kott, and Francine McKenzie for taking the time to engage with Pax Economica and for their insightful reviews; to Jamie Martin for his sharp introduction; and to Diane Labrosse for commissioning the roundtable as well as for all her keen editorial work along the way. I was especially delighted to see that the reviewers, who are renowned experts approaching the book from diverse disciplinary vantage points,[31] find the argument to be provocative and a challenge to the prevailing historiography. I am also glad that they appreciate the book’s idiosyncratic structure, which allowed for more direct engagement with the historiographies of the liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminist peace activists, and Christian pacifists who searched for a free trade world order of peace, prosperity, democracy, and social justice across nearly two centuries.
As discussed in the book’s introduction, conclusion, and elsewhere,[32] our current economic nationalist moment is starting to bear remarkable resemblances to the war-torn protectionist decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which is the principal period of Pax Economica. This transformation has been both swift and shocking. When I first started researching this book in 2015, the US-led “neoliberal” era of free markets, deregulation, and interdependence, regulated through supranational bodies like the World Trade Organization (WTO), seemed alive and well. Yet, jumping forward ten years we find ourselves in a new era of globalization in which the US is retreating behind high tariff walls, leaving its longtime allies ostracized and the WTO toothless. In fact, at the time of writing this roundtable response in February 2025, it has been mere days since Republican President Donald “Tariff Man” Trump threatened 25 percent tariffs against the United States’ two closest trading partners, Mexico and Canada, and another 10% increase against China. Trump has vowed that the EU is next. The self-proclaimed “peace” president has started these trade spats while also calling for US colonization of Greenland, Panama, Canada, and Gaza.[33] This one-two punch of protectionism and imperial expansionism eerily reflects the geopolitical backdrop that Pax Economica’s left-wing free traders were working against, a point of historical comparison that the reviewers pick up on in various guises.
I hope that Pax Economica can provide a useful point of historical reference for those who are seeking to understand our new protectionist era by rediscovering the free trade visions of left-wing anti-imperialists and peace workers. Like the reviewers, I also hope that the book represents the start, not the end, of the conversation surrounding left-wing internationalism’s rich and complex relationship with free trade. And on this point, all the reviewers begin this conversation by flagging aspects that warrant further investigation. Kott, for example, points to the role of trade unions, Eastern European contributions to dependency theory, the Soviet Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, and more perspectives from Latin America. I can only agree. Like Kott and Conway, I also want to read more about Catholic economic cosmopolitanism and economic nationalism. In researching the chapter on Christian cosmopolitanism, I was struck by how so much of the historiographical attention on the Christian Left focuses upon Protestantism.[34] By including Catholic voices like the Catholic Association for International Peace and its president Parker T. Moon, Chicago anti-imperialist Edward Osgood Brown, New York’s Father Edward McGlynn, Irish Catholic co-operatives, and Germany’s Catholic Zentrum Party, I hoped to offer a corrective, however limited. I agree that there is still much more to be done here.
While I make clear at the outset that this was first and foremost a free trade movement centered within white Western European and US left-wing networks, Pax Economica accounts for numerous actors and organizations that broke this geographical and racial mold. For example, from the anti-colonial side of the story, the book examines, among others, India’s grassroots economic nationalist Swadeshi movement, Chinese nationalist opposition to Western free-trade imperialism, and the Pan-Africanist economic visions of Black US intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois and the former president of Ghana Kwame Nkrumah. From the left-wing free trade side, this also includes the Argentine Socialist Party and a young Argentinian economist named Raúl Prebisch, the Brazilian economist Antonio de Queiros Telles Jr., the Indian nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji, the Hungarian feminist Rosika Schwimmer, and Filipino independence leaders like trade unionist Don Luis Hidalgo. But I would certainly welcome new research that expands our knowledge of Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Asia Pacific.
I must admit that I enjoyed incorporating more recognizable historical actors like US social reformer, women’s suffragist, and peace worker Jane Addams and Russian writer and peace activist Leo Tolstoy into an economic ideological perspective that might surprise readers. On this point, McKenzie asks whether it is accurate to depict Tolstoy as a Russian disciple of the US political economist Henry George as it might “displace Tolstoy’s Christian beliefs, pacifism, and support for anarchy.” In this instance, my purpose was not to displace these long-held descriptors, but merely to recast them as stemming, in no small part, from Tolstoy’s (oft-overlooked) subscription to George’s left-wing free trade ideas. Similarly, while I wholeheartedly agree with McKenzie that there was an important imperial story to free trade running alongside the left-wing narratives of the book—a tension that I discuss head-on in the introduction and at the outset of each chapter—my intention here was to recover free trade’s marginalized anti-imperial and pacifistic voices and visions in order to balance the prodigious literature connecting economic and political liberalism with Euro-American imperialism.[35]
In its traipsing across almost two centuries and across the globe, my book, as some of the reviewers note, does not always take full account of how “context-specific the concept of free trade was” (Conway) and does not always discuss free trade as “a sticky concept” (McKenzie). These are fair points, but stem from the fact that, despite adhering to different free trade visions and methods for attaining them, the left-wingers I included all shared similar ends that remained remarkably static: namely an interdependent and democratic world order free from want and war. The role of the state within left-wing globalist visions provides just such an example of how means and methods—but not ends—changed.
After the First World War, left-wing free traders became increasingly convinced that nation states, if left to their own devices, would almost always choose self-sufficiency over co-operation. This disillusionment led to their backing a variety of supranational governance bodies to regulate the freeing of world trade. Far from seeing this as a contradiction, from the First World War onwards, they viewed supranational regulation to be a necessity for their left-wing visions of an economically interdependent world. But as Ekbladh rightly points out, some who might fall within this broad left-wing umbrella still believed that the nationalistic state was redeemable. I also agree that development became more central to left-wing globalist planning after 1945. While I discuss the left-wing free trade movement’s growing sympathy with and support for the developmental demands of the decolonizing world through, say, the International Trade Organization (ITO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the New International Economic Order (NIEO), Fair Trade, and international co-operativism, more on this developmentalist evolution in their thinking awaits further explication.
Many thanks again to Martin Conway, David Ekbladh, Sandrine Kott, and Francine McKenzie for their gracious and penetrating reviews. I second their calls for further research into all the areas that they’ve helpfully highlighted, and more besides. Considering our increasingly economic nationalist and conflict-ridden world order, the historical recovery of left-wing free trade visions of world peace, anti-imperialism, democracy, and food security seem timelier than ever. Hopefully Pax Economica marks the beginning of that recovery, and not its denouement.
[1] See, for example, Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton University Press, 2011); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2020); Eric Helleiner, The Neomercantilists:A Global Intellectual History (Cornell University Press, 2021); Madeleine Lynch Dungy, Order and Rivalry: Rewriting the Rules of International Trade after the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
[2] The designer of the game, Elizabeth Magie, was a follower of US political economist Henry George, who argued that free trade would, alongside radical tax reforms, encourage global peace.
[3] Helleiner, The Neomercantilists.
[4] Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
[5] See notably Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2015); and the highly influential narrative histories of Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987) and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (Michael Joseph, 1994).
[6] See the important recent monograph: Tehila Sasson, The Solidarity Economy: Nonprofits and the Making of Neoliberalism after Empire (Princeton University Press, 2024).
[7] James Chappel, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard University Press, 2018); Giuliana Chamedes, A Twentieth-Century Crusade: The Vatican’s Battle to Remake Christian Europe (Harvard University Press, 2019); Samuel Moyn, Christian Human Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
[8]David Todd, Free Trade and its Enemies in France, 1814–1851 (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Francis Démier, La nation, frontière du libéralisme: libre-échangistes et protectionnistes français, 1786–1914 (Éditions du CNRS, 2022).
[9] See Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[10] On recent industrial policy see Mariana Mazzucato and Sarah Doyle, “Biden’s Incomplete Industrial Policy,” Foreign Affairs, 6 May 2024. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/bidens-incomplete-industrial-policy, accessed 16 July 2024.
[11] On the Trump administration’s tariff policy see Robert E. Lighthizer, No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers (Broadside Books, 2023).
[12] “The New Economic Order” The Economist, 11 May 2024.
[13] For prime examples of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century globalization boosterism rooted in free trade, see Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999); John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (Crown Business, 2000).
[14] Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[15] For more on the views of pacifist groups see Robert David Johnson, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Harvard University Press, 1995).
[16] On Hull and reciprocal trade in the Depression see Thomas W. Zeiler, Capitalist Peace: A History of American Free-Trade Internationalism (Oxford University Press, 2022), 14-28. On Hull for president, see Erwin D. Canham, “The Wide Horizon: Cordell Hull: The Democrats’ Man for 1940?” The Christian Science Monitor, 21 November 1938, 22; “Draft Statement of the Non-Partisan Committee to Draft Cordell Hull,” 30 June 1939, box 45, Raymond Leslie Buell Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, 1-3.
[17] An example of a Depression era plea for a more planned international trade regime as opposed to other options, see Henry A. Wallace, America Must Choose: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Nationalism, of World Trade, and of a Planned Middle Course (Foreign Policy Association and World Peace Foundation, 1934). It was a pamphlet paid for and distributed by two organizations steeped in the free-trade ethos, the World Peace Foundation and the Foreign Policy Association.
[18] On the investment of non-state and internationalist groups in post-World War II developmentalism see Thomas Richard Davies, NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society (Oxford University Press, 2014); Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (University of California Press, 2002).
[19] This claim has a long history itself. For an early discussion of it in policy see Burton Ira Kaufman, Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); for a more recent articulation, see Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
[20] See Paul Adler, No Globalization without Representation: U.S. Activists and World Inequality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
[21] In most works, free trade is presented in all its ambiguity. In English, see the important work of the Swiss economic historian Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (University of Chicago Press,1993); see also Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Thomas W. Zeiler, Capitalist Peace: A History of American Free-Trade Internationalism (Oxford University Press, 2022).
[22] See, among many others: Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and the various books in Bloomsbury’s Histories of Internationalism series (Jessica Reinisch and David Brydan) which also publishes in English (lingua franca) contributions by non-English-speaking authors: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/histories-of-internationalism/.
[23] On that issue, see Anthony Carew, Michel Dreyfus, Geert van Goethem, Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick, Marcel van der Linden, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (Peter Lang: 2000).
[24] Joseph L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil. (Stanford Univ. Pr.: 1996). See also Uwe Müller, Dagmara Jajesniak-Quast, eds., “Comecon Revisited: Integration in the Eastern Bloc and Entanglements with the Global Economy,” Comparativ 27 (Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2017); Angela Romano and Federico Romero, eds., European Socialist Regimes’ Fateful Engagement with the West: National Strategies in the Long 1970s (Routledge, 2020) ; Simon Godard. Le Laboratoire de l’internationalisme: le CAEM et la construction du bloc socialiste (1949–1991) (Presses de Sciences Po, 2021).
[25] To give just a few examples, see Karl Brandt, Geschichte der Volkswirtschaft. Band 2: Vom Historismus bis zur Neoklassik, (Haufe Verlag, 1994); Andreas Eges. Wirtschaftsnationalismus USA und Deutschland im Vergleich (1815–1914) (Campus Verlag, 1999); Werne Abelshauser, David Gilgen, Christopher Kopper, Andreas Leutzsch, (eds.), Deutschland als Modell?: rheinischer Kapitalismus und Globalisierung seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Dietz, 2010); and Francis Démier, La nation, frontière du libéralisme : libre-échangistes et protectionnistes français 1786-1914 (CNRS Editions, 2022).
[26] Apologies to all for these very brief descriptions of people with multifaceted lives, extraordinary achievements, and long-lasting legacies.
[27] The literature on peace history is growing quickly. For an overview, see Ingrid Sharp, ed., A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) and Ronald Edsforth, ed., A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic 2020). Eric Helleiner, The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) is essential reading on the history of economic ideas. See also Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton University Press, 1996).
[28] See, for example, Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2005); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019); Leila J. Rupp: Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton University Press, 1997.)
[29] For a brief explanation of the appeal of protectionism, see Douglas A. Irwin, Free Trade under Fire, Fourth edition (Princeton University Press, 2015), 99-113. See also, Helleiner, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell University Press, 2022).
[30] Helleiner, The Contested World Economy.
[31] See, for instance, Martin Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton University Press, 2020); David Ekbladh, Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (University of Chicago Press, 2022); Sandrine Kott, A World More Equal: An Internationalist Perspective on the Cold War, trans. Arby Gharibian (Columbia University Press, 2024); and Francine McKenzie, GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era (Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[32] My recent reflections on our economic nationalist moment include Marc-William Palen, “Using Tariffs to Try to Turn Canada into American State Backfired in the Past,” Time, 6 Feb. 2025; Palen, “Can the Left Reclaim Free Trade?” UnHerd, 13 May 2024; Palen, “Feminism’s Forgotten Free Trade Past,” History Matters 23 April 2024; “Le libre-échange de gauche promettait d’instaurer la paix modiale,” Le Monde, 12 April 2024; Palen, “Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition,” LPE Project, 21 March 2024; Palen, “Monopoly’s Forgotten Left-Wing Origins,” Time, 28 Feb. 2024.
[33] See, for example, “Trump Refuses to Rule out Use of Military Force to Take Control of Greenland and the Panama Canal,” Associated Press, 8 Jan. 2025; “Trump Proposes ‘Permanently’ Displacing Palestinians so U.S. Can Take Over Gaza,” CBC, 4 Feb. 2025; “China’s Tit-for-Tat Tariffs on US Take Effect,” BBC News, 9 Feb. 2025.
[34] See, for instance, Patricia Appelbaum, Kingdom to Commune: Protestant Pacifist Culture between World War I and the Vietnam Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Nobuya Bamba and John F. Howes, eds., Pacifism in Japan: The Christian and Socialist Tradition (University of British Columbia Press, 1978); Brian G. Byrd and John Paul Loucky, “Toyohiko Kagawa and Reinhold Niebuhr: The Church and Cooperatives,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 28:1-2 (2016): 63-88; John S. Conway, “Resisting Militarism: The Peace Movement in the German Evangelical Church During the Weimar Republic,” Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 4:1 (May 1991): 29-45; Harald Fischer-Tiné, Stefan Huebner, and Ian Tyrrell, eds., Spreading Protestant Modernity: Global Perspectives on the Social Work of the YMCA and YWCA, 1889–1970 (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021); Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Stefan Grotefeld, “Peace Enforcement Through International Friendship of the Churches from 1919 to 1933: The Example of the German World Alliance,” Current Research on Peace and Violence 13:4 (1990): 193-209; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Clarendon Press, 1988); Julie L. Holcomb, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Cornell University Press, 2016); David A. Hollinger, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017); David P. King, “The West Looks East: The Influence of Toyohiko Kagawa on American Mainline Protestantism,” Church History 80:2 (2011): 302-320;Michael Thompson, For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2016); Alexander Tyrrell, “Making the Millennium: The Mid-Nineteenth Century Peace Movement,” Historical Journal 21:1 (March 1978): 75-95; Gene Zubovich, Before the Religious Right: Liberal Protestants, Human Rights, and the Polarization of the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
[35] See, among many others, Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Penguin, 2022); Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, Liberal Imperialism in Germany: Expansion and Nationalism, 1848–1884 (Berghahn, 2008); John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6:1 (1953): 1-15; Jo Grady and Chris Grocott, eds., The Continuing Imperialism of Free Trade: Developments, Trends and the Role of Supranational Agents (Routledge, 2018); Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 1972); Onur Ince, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2018); Karuna Mantena, “The Crisis of Liberal Imperialism,” in Duncan Bell, ed., Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 113-135; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999); R. J. Moore, “Imperialism and ‘Free Trade’ Policy in India, 1853–4,” Economic History Review 17:1 (1964): 135-145; Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton University Press, 2005); Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (Hill and Wang, 1982); Bernard Semmel, The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire: Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to Lenin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press, 2018); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (World Publishing Company, 1959).