The past few years have been very good to historians interested in the War of 1812. The bicentennial renewed much scholarly interest in the conflict, and a number of books and journal articles have expanded historical knowledge on the subject. Paul Gilje's Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 is among the most significant of these recent works because of its wide engagement with the existing literature and its convincing argument regarding the indispensable maritime nature of the conflict.

Scholarship on the United States’s second war with Great Britain has long depicted it as a messy affair, with imprecise origins and outcomes. This varied historiography has alternated among a constellation of interpretations, including the maritime issues of impressment and trade restriction, long-standing conflicts with Native Americans over white expansion in the Northwest and the South, threats to the American conception of national honor, and the breakdown of diplomacy between the United States and Great Britain (to name just a few). Gilje's book offers a reassessment of the origins of the conflict and the changing memories of the war during the nineteenth century by following up on the historical question: What gave the war meaning to its contemporaries? The title, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights (from navy captain David Porter's motto emblazoned on the sails of his frigate), neatly encapsulates the narrative thrust and argument of the book: the war was principally about the dual maritime issues of trade and impressment.

Although the maritime controversies have long been at the center of many histories of the War of 1812, Gilje presents the issues in a much broader context than they have heretofore received in the scholarship; this book should be of particular interest to business historians concerned with the legal and ideological frameworks underpinning global trade in the long eighteenth century. Gilje's methodology is to pair, and parse, what he interprets as an elite-oriented conception of free trade in American foreign policy alongside the interests of common sailors whose labor made the entire international economic system work.

Gilje traces the long-term origins of the war to Enlightenment conceptions of free trade, the new diplomacy of the American Revolution, and the rise of a distinct community of American sailors. Eighteenth-century Americans had five distinct, although mutually supporting, notions of free trade: first, the ability to trade in any market; second, the opening of trade to areas where it was normally closed due to restrictive laws; third, most-favored-nation status; fourth, no trade barriers in the form of tariffs or other restrictions; and fifth, complete neutral exemptions from trade restrictions during periods of international war. John Adams's Model Treaty of 1776 integrated free-trade ideals, in their various forms, into the founding document of American foreign policy, and these goals would continue as the raison d’être of Jefferson's and Madison's international relations in the early nineteenth century. Alongside the free-trade ideals of the Enlightenment, the rise of “Jack Tar”—a distinct political community composed of sailors—marked a crucial turning point in the influence of common people upon the politics of the early republic. Because sailors played an outsized role in the global economy and made frequent claims for their individual rights, American policymakers had to consider their plight when faced with impressment into the British Royal Navy. After Jefferson's embargo and Madison's nonimportation laws failed to coerce the British to relent on their orders in council and the policy of impressment, American leaders chose to pursue violent means to secure their country's and countrymen's maritime rights.

In addition to the dual themes of free trade and sailors’ rights, Gilje devotes chapters to other explanatory frameworks for the War of 1812—namely, expansion into native lands and national honor. Although these chapters are well-trodden ground for specialists, they are particularly useful for more general readers who might wish to situate the book's historiographical intervention. Gilje does not discount the importance of territorial acquisition and honor culture in explaining the wider dimensions of the war. Rather, he argues that these aspects of American politics and society, while important, were incidental to the underlying causes of the conflict.

The interpretive framework of the book raises an important question about the nature of American economic thought that deserves to be addressed in future studies. Throughout his argument, Gilje characterizes free-trade principles as the driving force behind elite support for the war. But was free trade—in all of its diverse meanings—merely an elite ideology? Or would it have had a wider purchase beyond the writings and policies of Jefferson and Madison? Gilje hints at an answer with his discussion of the political economy of the 1807 embargo and the 1820s tariff debates but has a noticeable gap during the war years. In 1812, the vast majority of Americans (both free and enslaved) were involved in some form of agricultural output, and they (as the history on the transition to capitalism in early America has shown) increasingly produced for a wider Atlantic market. For the producers of flour in the Delaware River Valley, tobacco and wheat in Virginia, cotton in South Carolina, and pork and corn in western states, free trade was not merely an abstract principle but a vital aspect of economic development. As Gilje notes, Jefferson and Madison clearly understood this reality. But did these agricultural producers, arguably common people like sailors, see war as a viable alternative to continued submission to British trade restrictions? Or was the decision for war largely the top-down approach spearheaded by Madison and the Congressional war hawks? Gilje's book invites scholars to grapple with these questions.

Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights is an important interpretation of the War of 1812 era that deserves to reach a wide audience. Gilje asks the right question about what gave the war “meaning” to its contemporaries, offers a convincing argument, and makes a significant historiographical contribution. Far more than just a political slogan, the phrase “free trade and sailors’ rights” shows how the United States came into being through the give-and-take between high-culture enlightenment values and the lived experiences of ordinary Americans.