Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World by Marc-Willian Palen. Princeton University Press, 2024, 309 pp.
The connection between a state’s economic ideals, its integration into the world economy and international institutions, and the likelihood of interstate war remain central points of contention in the study of international relations. Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica reminds readers that the intellectual debate on these topics long precedes the economic institution-building of the post-World War II era and that these dialogues have had many different and sometimes unlikely torchbearers.
Palen aims to “challenge a wide scholarship that has tended not to look earlier than the 1930s and 1940s to understand the origins of post-1945 economic globalization” (11). In so doing he pushes against the historical consensus as he sees it that “Cold War lenses have blurred the historical depiction of modern left-wing radicalism, displacing the economic peace movement from its previously prominent position” (11). Pax Economica is successful in this regard as it presents a rich Venn diagram of overlapping free trade, anti-imperial, and peace interests among some surprising sectors of American and European society between roughly 1840 and 1940.
Palen begins by setting the context in which his book’s subjects operated, namely that century of widespread economic nationalism. The American System, so-named by Alexander Hamilton and most forcefully encouraged by German-US economist Friedrich List, promoted protectionist trade policies and domestic internal improvement projects to advance domestic industries and best exploit colonial markets. These ideas were emulated outside of the United States; France, Germany, Japan, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire all adopted policies much more reminiscent of American protectionism than the free trading of Britain. But the narrative is not only one of trade preferences. Palen recounts an accompanying mindset of “militarism, jingoism, war, and imperial expansion” (50).
Having established the narrative’s antagonist as the American System and protectionist ideas of List and company, Palen tells his story through a self-admitted “motley crew of left-wing free traders,” devoting chapters to liberal radicals, socialists, feminists, and Christians. Readers learn of the seminal role of English free-trade advocate Richard Cobden, the namesake of the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier Treaty, which aimed to improve British and French relations through peace movements in several countries. The book introduces readers to the strange bedfellows of Manchester School liberalism and socialist internationalists. It takes them into the transnational history of feminist peace movements and their connection with free trade ideals. And it traces the origins of the Christian peace movement linking free trade, antislavery, and pacific ideals. Each chapter covers these characters and their changes through a century of political change from the 1840s to the conclusion of World War II.
Ideas occupy a central role in Palen’s work, and it is not always clear how much he intends them to be seen as influential on subsequent actors or reflective of those actors’ otherwise inherent political preferences. The narrative tilts toward the former, showing how ideas grow and how actors emulate, for example, List’s positions on trade protectionism. But ideas do not exist in a vacuum, and it is perhaps an irony in places where economic nationalism takes hold that it is the perception of the interests of a nation’s subset that drives economic nationalism. In this sense one might wonder why certain economic narratives, whether Cobden’s or List’s, take hold among different sectors of society, an investigation that lies outside of Palen’s work.
The eclectic collection of Palen’s protagonists demonstrates both the book’s key historiographic contribution and also the limits of such a narrative. One walks away from Palen’s account with a fuller picture of some of those who carried the globalist banner during a time of widespread economic nationalism and trade protectionism. Readers gain a considerable appreciation for the connective tissue between otherwise disparate groups as the individual chapters show a strong intellectual tradition that cuts across vastly different cleavages within society. In its assembly of such a “motley crew,” however, the boundaries of Palen’s analysis are not entirely clear. Palen has identified groups with something to say about free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace, and in so doing casts the narrative around cosmopolitanism and internationalism. But where these analytical boundaries begin and end is not entirely clear.
On this note several other recent publications add context to Palen’s diverse cast of characters. Eric Helleiner’s The Contested World Economy: The Deep and Global Roots of International Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and its excellent predecessor, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (Cornell University Press, 2021), offer a greater comprehensive view of the intellectual history of free trade and protectionism in the modern era. In a similar vein Glory M. Liu’s Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton University Press, 2022) demonstrates some of the intellectual debate over and regional dynamics of trade protectionism in nineteenth-century America, a debate Palen largely glosses over in his characterization of the American System.
While Pax Economica does not provide a comprehensive intellectual history of free traders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is not the book’s aim. Readers interested in gaining insights into the left-wing groups noted above or the different facets of the long debate regarding the connection between economic integration and war will find rich veins to mine in Palen’s book. The book concludes with a chapter pulling the historical analysis into the present, demonstrating that a facility in the history of free-trade narratives provides a deeper understanding to debates that continue to recur today.
Sean Braniff, PhD