In 1841 the German political economist Friedrich List published The National System of Political Economy, a scathing attack on the principles of free trade espoused by Adam Smith. A better alternative, in List’s view, was the position of Edmund Burke, who supposedly understood that the economic policies of a state must be determined by its particular national interests, even if that meant ditching free trade for protectionism. This reading of Burke as an anti-Smithian economic nationalist has not aged well, and in recent decades scholars have begun to regard Burke and Smith as more aligned on economic matters than previously assumed.

Gregory Collins has gone still further by presenting Burke as a passionate champion of free markets who nevertheless pleaded for the worst excesses of commerce to be curbed by considerations of virtue, honor, and religion (the “manners” of the book’s title). Collins has produced a work of impressive bulk that not only sheds light on many neglected aspects of Burke’s career and writing but also presents extensive statistical data on eighteenth-century trade volumes and price fluctuations. (It is rare to see a book on Burke crammed with bar charts, lists, and bullet points!) This information provides a useful backdrop for examining Burke’s many interventions on economic matters, including his proposals for reforming court finances, his assistance in drafting the Free Ports Act, his criticisms of Britain’s trade policy toward its American and Irish colonies, and his detailed analysis of French systems of taxation both before and during the revolution. Those who still maintain that Burke only took a passing interest in economic matters or had only a weak grasp of the intricacies of finance no longer have a leg to stand on.

The book is also strikingly original in its organization. Collins dispenses with chronology by beginning with Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, a memorandum on the corn trade that Burke “scribbled” to William Pitt in 1795 as the country reeled from food riots (p. 44). This is a strange place to start looking for the “deeper philosophic substance” of Burke’s views on economic matters (p. 141). For starters, the text we now know as Thoughts and Details on Scarcity was not published until 1801, long after Burke’s death. It was put together by two of his executors who combined Burke’s memorandum to Pitt with fragments from letters to Arthur Young on agricultural wages that Burke advertised he would publish but never did, prioritizing other projects instead. It takes interpretive intrepidness to regard this amalgam of manuscripts as the “fulcrum for understanding Burke’s economic thought,” especially as Collins himself acknowledges that it is “not a systematic treatise” (pp. 143, 38). Nevertheless, in this memorandum’s hostility to government controls on grain prices, public granaries, and minimum wages, Collins finds the essential principles of an economic philosophy that contains a “faint silhouette of Friedrich Hayek” (p. 53). This move will flummox more historically minded scholars who might wonder what is to be gained from translating Burke’s policy proposals into a “Hayekian lexicon” of unintended consequences, competitive price systems, and externalities (p. 138). If Collins’s argument gains traction, then Thoughts and Details might enjoy a similar career to Marx’s German Ideology, another text posthumously cobbled together by editors from scattered fragments and later imbued by scholars with a significance that the author could scarcely have imagined.

This book is not, however, an attempt to present Burke as a proto-Hayek. Collins knows his subject too well to ignore the countless instances in which Burke succumbed to more interventionist impulses or gave precedence to the commercial interests of the British state over ideals about free trade. Among the sins Burke committed against the free market that Collins mentions are his support for export bounties on corn, his early defense of the East India Company’s trade monopoly, his acceptance of (and occasional enthusiasm for) the Navigation Acts, and his opposition to various Anglo-French commercial treaties. Burke, in other words, was often a bad Hayekian, subordinating markets to the demands of realpolitik and imperial glory. Friedrich List was not entirely wrong about him.

To his credit Collins does not shy away from the difficulties these examples pose for his reading of Burke as an impassioned advocate of market freedom. The problem, however, is that he too often insists on characterizing Burke’s deviations from economic liberalism as pragmatic concessions made under the pressure of circumstances, rather than as evidence of Burke’s thinking. When confronted with Burke’s claim, in the 1766 Observations on the Late State of the Nation, that higher taxes levied by the Rockingham administration to finance the Seven Years’ War were relatively harmless, Collins reminds us that this argument was contained in a “political tract” and was not “an abstract normative claim” (p. 263). Similarly, Burke’s argument in his Speech on American Taxation (1774) that Britain had every right to continue regulating American trade to its advantage showed him bowing to the “demands of prudential statesmanship” and “practical policy,” rather than engaging in “speculative enterprises” (p. 280). Equally, Burke’s support for Irish protectionist measures against English linen was, Collins assures us, “practical” and did “not rest on the abstract principle of free trade” (p. 332). In other words, when Burke strikes out against monopolies, price controls, and minimum wages, Collins hears the voice of a philosopher; when Burke says or does something that pushes in the opposite direction, Collins sees a politician at work. However, having conferred philosophical status on Thoughts and Details, it becomes more difficult for Collins to convincingly regard Burke’s less liberal interventions as merely practical fudges or reluctant, unphilosophical compromises. We must “remind ourselves,” Collins writes elsewhere, “that Burke’s committee reports and speeches were articulated in a tense political environment rather than in a university classroom” (p. 397). True enough, but this also applies to Thoughts and Details. Exactly why this particular policy intervention should be spared reduction to a merely “political” speech act is not sufficiently clear.

At times Collins’s fondness for his subject leads him to overlook what Burke got wrong. Burke’s analysis of the East India Company’s transition from trading enterprise to a conquering private army, for example, was often skewed. Most consequentially, by concentrating his attack on Warren Hastings’s tenure as governor general of Bengal, Burke downplayed the far worse depredations of the company under Robert Clive’s management and exonerated Britain’s wider imperial endeavor (Hastings was not, as Collins claims, the “guiltiest culprit” in the sorry history of the company’s crimes; p. 401). As Collins describes matters, Burke wanted to reform imperial rule in India by restoring the “tender bonds of trust” between company rulers and Indian merchants (p. 390). But the legacy of more than a century of asset stripping, plunder, and corporate warfare could hardly be erased with more virtuous leadership friendlier to market principles.

By drawing out the affinities with Hayek, Collins challenges older readings of Burke as a sworn defender of aristocratic landed estates against the invasions of commerce and new money. For many, Burke’s dogged pleading on behalf of the landed gentry and his attacks on the “monied interest” in his Reflections on the Revolution in France have always been difficult to square with his numerous statements lauding the benefits of commercial activity (p. 427). In one of the better arguments in the book, Collins exposes this tension as illusory, showing quite convincingly that Burke viewed the British aristocracy (rightly or wrongly) as economic modernizers who had both the means and the inclination to encourage trade, agricultural innovation, and economic growth. For Burke, maintaining a thriving economic order required enlisting the landed aristocracy, not despoiling them.

The book ends by situating Burke within various American political traditions, reflecting its target audience. Collins rightly insists that Burke cannot easily be recruited into the camps of free-market fundamentalists (his opposition to the intrusion of market logic into every corner of society resembles contemporary criticisms of neoliberalism) or of more communitarian conservatives concerned about the erosion of traditional values under the pressures of modern capitalism. In any case, the gulf separating eighteenth-century British imperial economics (not to mention economic thought) from contemporary capitalist states renders Burke’s views of limited applicability. In the end, although Collins is overly eager to find the Hayekian Burke, he presents such a wealth of material on Burke’s economic views that there is fodder for several rival Burkes to emerge. Long may the debate continue.