The rise of the United States as an industrial rival to Britain, achieved under high tariff protection whilst Britain itself remained committed to free trade, marked the four decades preceding the First World War. Against the backdrop of this remarkable growth, the ‘depression’, real or imagined, dominating the British commercial outlook from around 1873 to the mid-1890s,Footnote 1 and Edwardian fears about national decline, a debate raged in Britain over the wisdom of persisting with free imports. From the 1870s, ‘fair traders’ called for retaliatory duties against countries protecting their own markets from British goods, and to shore up Britain's great power status many also desired to forge closer commercial links with the empire through preferential tariffs. In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain brought tariff reform to the forefront of party politics, demanding manufacturing tariffs alongside imperial preference. Given the sharp policy differences between Britain and America, and the latter's economic performance, references to the protectionist republic were unsurprisingly ubiquitous in the fiscal debate in this period, appearing in countless speeches and writings on both sides. This article asks how politicians, statesmen, and writers both reacted to, and explained, the country's development, and demonstrates that fiscal reformers regarded the United States as both Britain's greatest economic enemy and the embodiment of their anti-Cobdenite ideals, whilst free traders viewed the republic as an economic false prophet and a political cautionary tale.
The first part of the article examines how America represented a very specific and potent threat for fiscal reformers. Its status as a major exporter of food and raw materials to Britain, whilst protecting itself against British manufacturing exports and increasingly challenging Britain in other markets, meant that American protectionism was absolutely central to the case for ‘fair trade’ and imperial preference. Spokesmen for a resurgent mercantilism criticized free trade's inability to respond to American tariffs, which they said had caused Britain's trade deficits with the United States, draining national wealth and creating a dangerous one-sided dependence on America for food. They also feared that American reciprocity deals would tempt Canada away from buying British manufactures. Imposing retaliatory duties against America implied great practical and political difficulty, and so imperial preference was intended to reduce dependence on American food, create fair exchange for British manufacturing exports, and preserve Britain's colonial trade. Historians have suggested that preference originated in the final quarter of the late nineteenth century from the natural amalgamation of patriotic fair trade with rising imperialism,Footnote 2 a response to the breakdown of the Cobdenite treaty system,Footnote 3 and the desire to arrest British decline,Footnote 4 and that it persisted into the Edwardian era as a measure to consolidate the empire as a unit and thus sustain Britain's international standing.Footnote 5 This article emphasizes that the policy at least partly arose as a grand scheme to save British manufacturing, and therefore preserve national greatness, by extracting Britain from unbalanced commercial relationships with protectionist foreign nations upon whom it depended for vital imports, of which that with America was considered the most egregious. By presenting preference as a complete solution to both imperial and industrial anxieties, it challenges Andrew Thompson's dichotomy between his own view of Edwardian tariff reform as an imperial project based around preference, and that of other historians who emphasize its purely protectionist and retaliatory aspects.Footnote 6
Furthermore, this article is somewhat unusual in that it presents the fair trade movement of the earlier part of this period and the Edwardian tariff reform campaign as one whole. The influence of America on the ideas of both, particularly regarding imperial preference, was similar enough to warrant conflating them as a broad fiscal reform ‘movement’ in this context. Historians who have focused on the Edwardian tariff debate have thus neglected the earlier fair trade movement's imperial aims. The National Fair Trade League's (NFTL) 1881 programme explicitly called for imperial preference, and members fleeing the League's wreckage in the late 1880s found refuge in the United Empire Trade League, formed in 1891.Footnote 7
Although fiscal reformers differed in the extent to which they favoured the various strands of anti-Cobdenite thought – protectionism, retaliation, reciprocity, and imperial preference – there was a broad consensus in support of preference with manufacturing tariffs. In this regard, the United States provided fiscal reformers with a powerful argument to help persuade the electorate to abandon free trade. They used the American example to illustrate the workings of a self-contained economic bloc, which they intended the empire united by preference to be, in which primary goods were swapped for manufactures, and to demonstrate that tariffs brought prosperity, high wages, and low prices. The threat posed by American prosperity to the then dominant Liberal economic orthodoxy was palpable. As a Times leader of 1873 admitted, the ‘average Liberal MP who visits the United States sometimes frankly confesses when he comes back that he was “bothered” by the Protectionist arguments of the business men he met, and had to take refuge in generalities instead of being able to reply’.Footnote 8 However, free traders met their opponents' use of the American example head on, considering it their job to see past the post hoc ergo propter hoc correlation between prosperity and protection.Footnote 9 They argued that, with abundant free land and an enormous internal market, American prosperity rested on conditions applicable neither to Britain nor to an imperial scheme, instead linking protection to America's severe economic dislocations. The second part of the article thus looks closely at both sides' use of the American economy.
Several historians have explored the American impact on the fiscal debate. Murney Gerlach creditably, but briefly, covers Liberal explanations in the 1890s for American wealth despite high protectionism,Footnote 10 while in the 1940s, Richard Heathcote Heindel examined the American example in the Edwardian tariff debate, covering many themes addressed here.Footnote 11 Both works lacked, however, the insights of recent free trade historiography. Anthony Howe and Frank Trentmann have revealed how free trade continued to command political credibility in a more democratic age, by coming to represent not popularized free market capitalism, but working-class welfare, consumer rights, community, nation, liberal values, and the moral purity of the state. Yet neither author has fully addressed the importance of America to the maintenance of that rhetorical stance.Footnote 12 Trentmann rightly states that Liberalism portrayed autocratic Germany, though less protectionist than America, as ‘the principal “other”’,Footnote 13 and although neglecting America's role, he correctly observes that in order to avoid contradicting the rhetorical linkage of free trade, democracy, liberal values, and prosperity, the coupling of protection and democracy in France and America ‘disappeared from the political imagination’.Footnote 14
The third section of this study shows how free traders dealt with the existence of a protectionist liberal democracy. America's economic success forced free traders to attack its protectionism on a politico-moral basis, adducing the United States as proof of the corrupting effects of tariffs on democracy and liberal values. The cosmopolitan nature of free trade, however, saw its supporters sincerely welcome Britain's economic and geopolitical supersession by a greater American power, and dearly wish for an end to America's corrupt protectionist ways so that it could lead the whole world to free trade.
I
Explaining the significance – or insignificance – of the Anglo-American trade imbalance played a crucial role in the fiscal debate. In 1909, one tariff reformer even claimed a direct causal relationship between overall American surpluses and British deficits since the Civil War.Footnote 15 Assisted by poor European harvests over 1878–81, America's wheat exports swelled its trade surplus with Britain to an annual average of £54 million during the 1880s. After peaking at £100 million in 1901, the surplus fell as Britain diversified its wheat sources, and was below 1880s levels by 1910.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, this persistent trade disparity shocked many Britons who had, for decades, been reared on the idea of mutually beneficial exchange. Fair traders in the 1870s and 1880s commonly believed that, by not permitting free exchange of manufactures for agricultural produce, American tariffs had drained gold from Britain and caused the ‘depression’.Footnote 17 ‘Brother Jonathan supplies’, bemoaned one disgruntled polemicist, ‘and John Bull sends his cash across the “herring pond” in return.’Footnote 18
Free traders retorted that the automaticity of the gold standard would eventually correct the deficit with America,Footnote 19 although, as will be shown, they also criticized American tariffs for perverting its operation. Since gold was thought to seek goods, free traders expressed their faith in ‘roundabout trade’, whereby deficits with America would be balanced by surpluses with other countries.Footnote 20 In the first half of this period, free traders also explained deficits with America as liquidation of debt incurred with Britain.Footnote 21 As America's debt position improved,Footnote 22 and it became a major capital exporter in the 1890s,Footnote 23 the emphasis shifted to invisible incomes, which kept the overall trade balance positive until the 1930s, but left free trade open to the charge of favouring rentier income over manufacturing employment.Footnote 24 Free traders most commonly cited shipping as the great boon to the balance of payments, which they regarded as an industry flourishing under free trade as British firms carried the bulk of America's seaborne trade, after American shipping had withered in the face of high shipbuilding and import costs resulting from protection. This was a view to which fiscal reformers had few effective retorts.Footnote 25
The American deficit especially rankled fiscal reformers, however, because the inequity of American tariffs subverted the purity of bilateral exchange. The American market's importance to British manufacturers meant that they were sorely affected by the explicit and relatively extreme protectionism practised by the United States, and from the 1870s there were cries for retaliation against American goods.Footnote 26 Following the passing of the highly protective McKinley Tariff in 1890, the Conservative MP, C. E. Howard Vincent, concerned for steel workers in his Sheffield constituency, attacked free trade for weakening Britain's ability to bargain down high American duties.Footnote 27
In response, free traders congratulated workers, falsely given recent research, on their ostensibly superior productivity compared to their American counterparts. More realistically, free traders also encouraged Britons to specialize in higher grade manufactures to overcome cheap, standardized, American-made goods.Footnote 28 However, the central free trade argument against retaliation on American imports into Britain was that it implied taxing food and raw materials, since manufactures accounted for only a small portion of total American imports and were therefore ‘too trivial to form the basis of an effective retaliatory system’.Footnote 29 Britain absorbed over half of all American, mostly agricultural, exports in the 1870s and 1880s.Footnote 30 Agrarian imports, including raw materials for textile manufacturing, accounted for 77 per cent of all imports into Britain in 1875, and were still as high as 67 per cent in 1913.Footnote 31 Contemporaries were more than aware of these statistical facts, and from early on, free traders argued that retaliation on American food would burden the working class.Footnote 32 By the 1900s, they had successfully revived memories of the ‘Hungry Forties’ and made the debate once more about food and the people,Footnote 33 although this time manufacturers, rather than landlords, cried for protection. In this respect, popular free trade leant comfortably on the structure of Anglo-American trade.
Free traders also maintained that retaliating on food and raw materials would raise domestic production costs, thus damaging Britain's commercial position.Footnote 34 ‘Retaliation, ending, as it must end, in an increased price for our raw material’, predicted George Barnes, the secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, ‘would appear to be a foolish, not to say criminal, policy to adopt towards the United States.’Footnote 35 Edwardian tariff reformers retorted that the American ‘scientific’ tariff to which they aspired allowed raw materials free entry;Footnote 36 but as will be shown, free traders acknowledged political corruption in America and doubted that any tariff could ever remain ‘scientific’. Furthermore, free traders believed Britain's bargaining position was simply too weak to make retaliation worthwhile. Winston Churchill counted only £16 million of manufactured goods in 1903 on which to retaliate, out of £122 million of American imports, ‘whereas the whole bulk of our trade would be open to any measures which they might think proper to take’.Footnote 37 As Andrew Marrison argues, American exporters would probably have tolerated British tariffs, which would have been low compared to those of Germany.Footnote 38 The risk felt across the free trade spectrum from polemicists to the Foreign Office, however, was that America would simply raise its tariffs even further in counter-retaliation.Footnote 39 While scholars have portrayed repeal of the Corn Laws as a ‘hegemonic’ action by Britain to induce corn supply from the western states,Footnote 40 in this period the British state had far less faith in the country's capacity to coerce America economically.Footnote 41
Free traders generally assumed that retaliation was pointless on the grounds that, since protection had such heinous effects, America would, like all protectionist countries, eventually come to its senses.Footnote 42 They remained hopeful that American farmers, considered the most burdened through protection, would someday assert themselves against the tariff.Footnote 43 Free traders' expectations of America's conversion to free trade actually increased as the country entered its most protective phase in the 1890s. By their logic, if protectionism increased, so would its evils and so too would public indignation in the United States. The McKinley Tariff was deemed ‘the last card of Protectionism’, and Goschen told the Commons that retaliation against the tariff was not a wise course, ‘especially as it is to be hoped that the Americans will see that they have made a great mistake in passing it’.Footnote 44
With retaliation so easily vilified by free traders, fiscal reformers regarded dependence on American food (which they argued protectionism rendered a one-sided dependency) as a straitjacket on the country and it became key to the case for fiscal change.Footnote 45 ‘We are supposing what indeed seems to be an inevitable certainty’, wrote one protectionist in 1880, ‘that England, twenty years hence, must openly lie before both America and Russia in this humiliated condition of helpless dependence for food.’Footnote 46 In 1883, Sampson S. Lloyd of the NFTL was referring to America when he told The Times that ‘[n]o nation can remain assuredly safe and strong while drawing so large a proportion of supplies from one State, especially one which practically excludes a return trade in commodities’.Footnote 47 Two decades later, some of the earliest writings in support of Joseph Chamberlain also featured paranoia over American control of Britain's food supply.Footnote 48 Against a backdrop of mild concern over the plausibility of an American wheat ‘corner’,Footnote 49 and the damp squib that was the 1903 Royal Commission on the food supply, Edwardian tariff reformers were increasingly concerned about the supply of American foodstuffs as expectations of European conflict grew.
The problem of depending on protectionist America for food, as the worsted manufacturer and convert from free trade, William Farrer Ecroyd, explained, was that as American tariffs undermined British manufacturing, Britain would eventually be ‘unable to purchase the needful food for our population, because we have nothing to offer that America and other countries are willing to receive in payment’.Footnote 50 To save its export industries, imperial preference sought to make Britain's dependency a mutual one. From the 1870s, fair traders resolved ‘to obtain our food supplies from those who will accept our productions in exchange’, arguing that home and colonial producers ought to receive preferential treatment because they were supposedly more willing than America to deal on fairer terms.Footnote 51 The Chamberlainite, James Garvin, explained that it was ‘certain that the more food and raw material we draw from the Colonies instead of from the United States, the greater proportion of manufactures we shall send out in return’.Footnote 52 For Farrer Ecroyd, imperial preference was a ‘calm, temperate, uniform, and permanent’ alternative to the contentious policy of retaliation against America.Footnote 53 Fair traders believed that ‘what Cobden and the early Free Traders aimed at’ – exchange of British manufactures for foreign primary exports – rather than what they saw as the perverted dogmatism of Gladstonian Liberals could only be attained through preference.Footnote 54 The colonies were, of course, protectionist themselves, and Canada also ran persistent and growing surpluses with Britain;Footnote 55 but buoyed by already healthy intra-imperial trade figures, Garvin noted that colonial tariffs were ‘a trifle’ compared to a 70 per cent average ‘under McKinleyism’, and that no colony matched America in capacity for self-sufficiency.Footnote 56
Edwardian tariff reformers also worried that tariff-induced American industrialization was drawing people off the land and into the cities, thus diverting wheat away from export to supplying urban consumers. As Balfour reasoned, contradicting others' emphases on one-sided dependence, if America did not sell wheat to Britain, it would not buy British goods in return, thus threatening British industry. ‘To us … who have to export manufactures largely because we have to import food’, he explained, ‘this may become a serious matter.’Footnote 57 With alarming figures showing a substantial fall in wheat exports between 1902 and 1904, tariff reformers warned that developing Canadian output was essential.Footnote 58 Britain was actually diversifying its sources of supply, as some contemporaries recognized,Footnote 59 but warnings in 1909 that America would soon cease to be a net food exporter as more people left the land further galvanized advocates of preference.Footnote 60 As a justification for preference, however, these concerns relied on an optimistic assumption that Canada would remain a primarily agricultural economy. Imperial preference presumed that the empire would continue to satisfy Britain's appetite for New World food and remain relatively open to British manufactures, thus diminishing dependence on America and saving British export industries.
Although preference aimed at maintaining the flow of cheap New World food, free traders demonized it as a food tax as they had with retaliation. Concentrating on the food duties themselves, rather than on the aim of merely changing the source of supply, they reminded Britons that they did not inhabit a self-reliant home market like America.Footnote 61 Particularly after the settlement of the Venezuelan boundary dispute, many also argued that, as war was likely to be with a European foe, food was better coming from a neutral America than an imperial possession vulnerable to enemy attack.Footnote 62
Paradoxically, increasing liberalization of American trade through bilateral bargaining made preference seem increasingly imperative to its supporters. Reciprocity, which became the mainstay of American tariff policy from the 1890s, as producers called for greater access to foreign markets and raw material imports,Footnote 63 seemed to threaten both the future of British commerce and the empire itself. Tariff reformers saw American reciprocity stealing Britain's alternative export markets, many of which were imperial. The McKinley Tariff Act, which provided for reciprocity, merely confirmed fears of competition for foreign markets and American imperialism on the American continent, and in the Caribbean and the Pacific.Footnote 64 The NFTL newspaper Fair-Trade cried that ‘the United States proposes nothing short of the commercial annexation or absorption of the whole American continent, north and south’.Footnote 65
The greatest fear was that America might tempt Canada into a free trade deal, an outright customs union, or, worse, a political union. From the 1880s, Canadians persistently called for closer union, commercially or otherwise, but despite industrial interests and Canadian nationalism defeating reciprocity at the polls in 1891 and 1911, British imperialists remained worried.Footnote 66 In the spring of 1905, American interest in reciprocity with Canada galvanized Chamberlain, and this fear pervades his Tariff Commission's memoranda.Footnote 67 The deal made by President Taft in 1911, which was rendered a dead letter by the Conservative victory in Canada that year, profoundly disturbed prominent tariff reformers like Garvin and W. A. S. Hewins, and encouraged the Tariff Reform League (TRL) to fight to retain preference at the heart of the tariff reform agenda.Footnote 68
Imperial preference was intended to draw Canada into closer commercial unity with Britain, for American reciprocity seemed to threaten not just the supply of Canadian wheat and raw materials, but the empire itself.Footnote 69 ‘The certain alternative to Imperial preference will be reciprocity as between Republic and the Dominion’, wrote Garvin, ‘then commercial union, then political incorporation.’ Britain's maritime dominance would cease with the creation of a ‘solid North America’, which ‘must be the first shipping and naval Power in the world’.Footnote 70 Whilst free traders had generally been more sanguine about North American free trade,Footnote 71 in tariff reformers' apocalyptic visions Canadian–American reciprocity was ‘the first step towards the disintegration of the Empire’, for the other self-governing dominions would soon follow suit, and Britain would ‘sink into a third-rate Power’.Footnote 72 As Duncan Bell has demonstrated, the United States was, for imperial federationists, geopolitically both Britain's greatest competitor and the best model for a united empire.Footnote 73 Similarly, fiscal reformers saw the republic as the country with the greatest potential to wreck Britain's economy, but also as a spectacular advertisement for abandoning free trade.
II
Dangerous as the American tariff system appeared to fiscal reformers, it was in fact one of their greatest assets in arguing the economic case for abandoning free trade. America was, however, rarely adduced as a complete template, and the extent of its protectionism actually appeared to shock many opponents of free trade. Chamberlain himself remarked that the American tariff was ‘an abomination … so immoderate, so unreasonable, so unnecessary that, although America has profited enormously under it, yet I think it has been carried to excessive lengths’.Footnote 74 It was rarely suggested that Britain itself should raise American-style tariffs to develop its home market. ‘We ought not to infer – and no reasonable Reformer has inferred – that we should do well to imitate off-hand the American example … The causes of American prosperity are doubtless many, and not all open to our imitation.’Footnote 75 Fiscal reform was marked by a general desire for freer trade achieved through constructive tariff policies, whether through retaliation and reciprocity or intra-imperial exchange, rather than mere insular protectionism.Footnote 76 Nor did many fiscal reformers see America as an exact blueprint for imperial preference. Only the minority idea of an outright imperial customs union envisioned something exactly similar to the American system, with internal free trade throughout the empire and a single imperial tariff policy for the outside world. Although Chamberlain and others continued to hold up the United States and the Zollverein as ideal models for the empire, the colonies repeatedly dismissed such a scheme.Footnote 77
The American example was more often a powerful rhetorical tool for arguing the case against free trade than an actual policy model. America represented the benefits of maintaining an agrarian hinterland as a secure market in which to trade manufactured goods for agricultural produce (in Britain's case through imperial preference), and of assisting the manufacturing sector through tariffs. This was Garvin's ‘dual apparatus’.Footnote 78 Unlike ‘one-sided’ Anglo-American trade, argued fiscal reformers, this would be ‘fair’, and would encourage, rather than restrict, commercial and industrial activity.Footnote 79
Manufacturing tariffs were to provide stability and security for capital, and would create and protect well-paying jobs, just as they seemed to do across the Atlantic. Garvin attributed German and American industrial efficiency to ‘equal competitive conditions’, while in Britain exposure ‘to the unlimited competition of the world’ had resulted in ‘lethargy and backwardness’.Footnote 80 Fiscal reformers believed that the safety from foreign competition provided by the American tariff actually stimulated competition and innovation by guaranteeing security of capital and thereby inducing investment.Footnote 81 Edwardian tariff reform was a response to British capital flowing behind foreign tariffs, not least America's, because investors were supposedly dissatisfied with the insecure position of British industry.Footnote 82
Although an imperial customs union was implausible, fiscal reformers intended imperial trade to resemble America's ‘free inter-State trade’, the enormous domestic exchange identified as the key to American prosperity.Footnote 83 Just as rapid American population growth had swelled the domestic market for American manufactures, so it was hoped that rising colonial populations would provide commercial opportunities for British firms squeezed out of their traditional foreign markets by protection.Footnote 84 For Leo Amery, America was ‘a triumphant vindication of the principle of limited competition’; but it had benefited from ‘the internal competition of a great Free Trade market’.Footnote 85
Achieved under heavy protectionism, America's conspicuous prosperity was potentially a difficult case for free traders, but they claimed that far from being a testament to the benefits of protection, America actually vindicated the free trade argument, in that American wealth arose from free exchange in its vast internal market. Alfred Marshall, for instance, called America ‘the largest Free Trade area in the world’, ‘ring-fenced’ with ‘so much Free Trade at home that the conditions of each individual industry approximate those which would exist, were the competition with all the world unrestricted.’Footnote 86 Like their opponents, free traders saw the unique regional variety of the American continent as a microcosmic world, rendering internal American free trade different from that within other nation-states, and reconciling ‘the American people to a tariff on foreign importations as oppressive as ever a nation has submitted to’.Footnote 87 Herbert Asquith informed the International Free Trade Congress in 1908 that foreign commerce was ‘comparatively insignificant’ for America, and that behind its ‘abounding productiveness’ was the ‘complete freedom of interchange between the cotton-growing States of the south, the cornfields of the middle and the west, and the manufacturing communities of the east’.Footnote 88 Such views were, however, inconsistent with free traders' propensity to measure Britain's own prosperity by the volume of its foreign trade, and relied upon an overly romantic view of the harmony of intersectional economic relations within the Union.Footnote 89
Free traders dismissed the American example's applicability to Britain and the empire, stressing that colonial tariffs prevented imperial preference approximating this internal free trade in America.Footnote 90 There was also scepticism that the United States or the Zollverein were comparable models for a scattered empire like Britain's, although tariff reformers believed that British naval supremacy rendered a sea-based free trade area ideal, and the only logical way to preserve Britain's position with the emergence of land-based rival empires.Footnote 91 Free traders claimed that America had prospered despite protectionism, because immigration expanded the home market and prevented monopoly in the labour force,Footnote 92 and also argued that American manufacturers overcame the higher costs of protectionism by exploiting the unprecedented economies of scale offered by their vast home market. America had thus become a successful industrial exporter through mass production, rather than the ‘dumping’ cited by tariff reformers when trying to justify retaliation.Footnote 93
Whilst free traders and fiscal reformers agreed on the economic wonder of the American market, they disagreed on its ‘steadiness’. Fiscal reform aimed to provide Britain with a stable market and therefore stable employment, in the belief that ‘American workmen have vastly benefited from a fiscal system which assures them regular employment at a high and steadily increasing rate of wages.’Footnote 94 Somewhat inconsistently given their emphasis on the country's internal exchange, free traders, however, claimed that America demonstrated how cyclical downswings under protectionism were far worse than under free trade, and largest in protected industries, blaming the country's tariffs for overproduction, speculation, and bust.Footnote 95 Whereas fiscal reformers admired protection for the security given to capital, for free traders, America proved that it led to inefficient resource allocation and unsustainable growth. Prospects of high profits would tempt too much capital into ‘artificial schemes’, but customers would ‘not follow as a matter of course’, resulting in ‘glutted markets and over-production’.Footnote 96
The volatility of the American economy became a powerful rhetorical weapon for free trade. ‘Does Protection assure the Americans against panics, dislocations of industry, bankruptcies, short times, reductions of wages?’ Churchill asked a working-class audience, before adding that ‘mills are being closed even more during the present trade depression in young, rich scientific America than they are over here in poor, blighted, ruined little England’.Footnote 97 For free traders, the wild American economic cycle compared unfavourably to the gentler path of British growth. ‘The developments [in protectionist countries] have been great’, one free trader told The Times, ‘and wealth has been accumulated, especially in the United States. I prefer, however, the steadier prosperity we have in England to the great fluctuations that obtain in these countries, especially in the United States.’Footnote 98 The economic volatility of the 1890s, when the McKinley and Dingley Tariffs drove protection to new heights, seemed to epitomize protectionism's excesses.Footnote 99 The theoretical threads running from earlier evangelically influenced Liberal Tory ideas are striking, with a shared emphasis, in both periods, on a ‘natural’ level of economic activity beyond which overproduction and gluts occurred, and on free trade and hard money ensuring ‘legitimate commerce’.Footnote 100 Although a new vision of progress had made American speculation and phenomenal growth a model for success by the 1860s, rather than a cautionary tale,Footnote 101 for the purposes of defending free trade, American protection was portrayed as inviting speculation, and volatile and ‘unnatural’ growth.
Fiscal reformers naturally sought to separate American tariffs from economic volatility. The TRL brashly suggested that free traders linking the financial meltdown of the ‘Panic of 1907’ to protection ‘might, with equal justice, attribute the San Francisco earthquake to the Dingley Tariff’, for neither protection nor free trade could prevent the inevitable slump after a period of commercial exuberance.Footnote 102 American economic volatility, in fact, originated in currency inelasticity due to an inappropriately regulated national banking system, and indeed fiscal reformers often attributed American panics to banking and monetary matters, a judgement actually shared by bastions of free trade such as The Economist and The Statist.Footnote 103 Free traders, however, often warned that such financial problems originated with tariffs, some berating the American industrial structure, concentrated by protection, for failing to ensure sound financial management and thus bringing down the banks.Footnote 104 They also accused American tariffs of inducing financial meltdown by subverting the functioning of the gold system. With their exports excluded from the American market, foreign countries could only pay for American goods in gold, and the consequent gold glut in the United States induced inflation, speculation, and bust.Footnote 105
For the purposes of attracting working-class votes, the most vital debate was over wages. Far more easily than lower-wage Germany, America provided fiscal reformers with an illustration for the masses of how protection bestowed higher pay.Footnote 106 Edwardian tariff reformers portrayed protectionism as a working man's policy in America, as opposed to the tool of the greedy capitalist in Liberal folklore.Footnote 107 Although fiscal reformers argued that increased trade through imperial preference would raise wages,Footnote 108 they more commonly praised American protection, at a time of increasing foreign competition, for sustaining high living standards in the face of downward pressure from lower-paid foreign labour.Footnote 109 The fair trader, H. J. Pettifer, an electro-plate worker and secretary of the Workmen's Association for Defence of British Industry, claimed that the choice was between ‘the English way of levelling down, and you never know when you will come to a stop; or the American way of levelling up’.Footnote 110 Like American protectionists, tariff reformers aimed to preserve a standard of living that they believed was risking erosion by laissez-faire cosmopolitanism in order to maintain competitiveness.Footnote 111
Fiscal reformers strove just as hard to win over the middle class with the promise of evading socialism. In the 1880s, the example of Massachusetts illustrated how protected high wages and consequent savings had ‘[knocked] the socialist and eight hours movement into a cocked hat’.Footnote 112 As the use of international statistical comparisons developed in the Edwardian period, the American experience indicated how higher wages and saving under fiscal reform would entail less dependency on the state.Footnote 113 Tariff reformers also linked the development of voluntary welfare capitalism in America directly to protection, with businesses guarded from cheaper foreign competitors providing for their workers.Footnote 114 Although such opinions can be seen as an attempt to unite voluntarism and protectionism in defiance of the strengthening bond between free trade and statist social policy, Chamberlain wished to make tariff reform and state-led social reform synonymous, as an alternative to an increasingly antediluvian image of Liberal laissez-faire individualism.Footnote 115 Broadly however, America served fiscal reform by epitomizing an imperial economy marked by ‘Social Progress through the restriction of competition.’Footnote 116
Empirical enquiry propelled debates over wages and tariffs forward. From Pettifer visiting America during the 1880s and ‘inspecting time sheets, and looking through the wage books’, to the more thorough investigation carried out by the Mosely Industrial Commission in 1902, the fiscal reform movement fed on personal and statistical accounts of high-wage America.Footnote 117 During the 1870s and 1880s, free traders frequently denied that American workers were paid more, with stories abounding of British immigrants returning home disgruntled and American factories overflowing with cheap foreign labour.Footnote 118 Popular perceptions were, however, of opportunity and wealth in the New World, and denying the personal prosperity of American workers was thus unrealistic. Although free traders continued trying to link American tariffs to low wages in the Edwardian period,Footnote 119 the development of government statistical output meant that while the Board of Trade's comparative wage statistics with European countries gave free traders great encouragement, protectionist America was always the awkward case, as exemplified by reactions to the Board's report on the working classes in American industrial towns in 1911.Footnote 120
Free traders therefore emphasized American exceptionalism. As one Edwardian pamphlet insisted, ‘high wages in America have no more connection with the American tariff than they have with the canals of Mars’.Footnote 121 Plentiful land underpinned explanations for high American wages, instantly making the New World incomparable to the Old. From the 1870s, free traders cited an abundance of cheap land making relatively scarce labour expensive and dictating industrial wage levels.Footnote 122 ‘We have been told that [protection] means high wages. Don't be taken in by that’, warned Lloyd George. ‘They refer you to the United States … In no sense is the United States a criterion. It is a country of endless resources.’Footnote 123 Accordingly, free traders constantly reminded the public that, if anything, protection held down American wages.Footnote 124
Defending free trade from the American example by emphasizing the role of land in creating American prosperity meshed with wider Liberal political economy. The fiscal question became linked to ‘free trade in land’ as free traders highlighted how advantageous forms of land tenure in America liberated people from the economic oppression of Europe.Footnote 125 Nevertheless, although the agricultural ‘depression’ of the late 1870s and 1880s inspired comparison and contrast with foreign land tenure systems, America featured less in polemical literature than European countries.Footnote 126 Even in the Edwardian period, the availability of cheap and plentiful land as a factor in American growth chimed perfectly with Liberal radicalism over ‘the land question’.
Connected to wages were the questions of prices and the cost of living under protection. Throughout this period, free traders held that, regardless of how high nominal American wages were, tariff-induced high prices meant lower real wages than in Britain.Footnote 127 High prices, either through restricted supply or taxation itself, were free trade's first line of defence. Although fiscal reformers hoped to avoid the affordability of food becoming an issue by emphasizing the colonies' potential to act as Britain's granary, free traders highlighted the ‘food tax’ element and used the imagery of the ‘Hungry Forties’ and the protectionist ‘dear loaf’ to great effect.Footnote 128 Their use of the American example also featured greater emphasis on the price of manufactured domestic goods than historians have yet fully recognized. The Free Trade Union (FTU) targeted the British working family-man with illustrated pamphlets, recounting the numerous duties his American counterpart paid on everyday items for himself, his wife, children, and home.Footnote 129
Fiscal reformers fought back in several ways. Throughout this period, admirers of the American system explained how it actually lowered prices by encouraging domestic competition and so boosting the domestic supply of manufactured goods.Footnote 130 Another strategy admitted higher prices, but assured that American tariffs fell on luxury and high-grade goods, rather than on working-class staples.Footnote 131 More commonly, fiscal reformers maintained that wages under protection were sufficiently high to compensate for higher prices,Footnote 132 and seized on findings in the reports of the Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade and Industry in 1886 and the Mosely Commission in 1903 which suggested that real wages were higher in the United States.Footnote 133
The cost of living debate in the Edwardian period is particularly interesting, as comparative price statistics were increasingly cited.Footnote 134 Focusing on the peculiar American case seemingly provided both sides with useful figures to validate their assumptions, and thus injected considerable ambiguity into any quantitative approach to campaigning. Free traders therefore relied on the rhetorical monster of the monopolistic trust. The Edwardian period was marked by a general uneasiness regarding trusts.Footnote 135 A series of high-profile American takeovers of British firms stoked anxieties,Footnote 136 and horror stories from across the Atlantic of human struggling against monopoly were diffused through press and politicians.Footnote 137 Fears of an American-style, trust-dominated future even helped to convince the British Left of the need for a representative parliamentary party.Footnote 138 Free traders claimed that protection had fostered trusts in America, and warned consumers that tariff-fostered industrial monopolies overcharged in the protected domestic market to subsidize dumping abroad.Footnote 139 J. A. Hobson, for example, explained that American tariffs had facilitated combination and monopoly, and thus ‘weakened the bargaining power of organized labour’, while also ‘securing to the trusts a full control over the American consumer’ by strangling supply.Footnote 140 The trusts thus undermined the idea that internal competition in the United States kept prices low.
However, there was a pronounced inconsistency between free traders' emphasis on internal trade in America and their linking American protectionism with monopoly. Some tariff reformers exploited this tension, explaining that trusts arose from competition. For Benjamin Kidd, for example, the trust was the organic outcome of competition and its emergence was a global trend.Footnote 141 Fiscal reformers argued that American market conditions were simply conducive to large-scale firms, and that some trusts were not even protected.Footnote 142 The TRL gleefully pointed out that British trusts existed under free trade, conceding that protection ‘aided and fostered’ the American trust, but that it was really ‘the creature of lax Company Laws’. The League presented a choice between commercial enslavement to protected American trusts, ‘over which we have not, and cannot have, the slightest control’, or trusts in Britain, ‘where they employ British capital and British labour, and are amenable to British public opinion and British law’.Footnote 143
Although many Liberals, such as D. A. Thomas and William Lever, reconciled free trade with industrial concentration, attacking American trusts was one of the most potent weapons in Edwardian free traders' armoury. German Kartels also featured in their polemics, which suggests that their attitudes towards American trusts to some extent simply reflected wider concerns about the relationship between protection and industrial concentration. This relationship had a special resonance in regard to the American example, however, as free traders were in that instance dealing with a protectionist liberal democracy rapidly taking the industrial lead, rather than a Reich widely vilified in British society for a regimented and illiberal approach to economic life. The trusts were one aspect of how free traders dealt with the awkward example of a successful protected American economy by undermining it on a moral and political basis, accusing protection of undermining democratic institutions and economic and political freedoms by corrupting elected representatives and by squeezing working-class consumers.
American prosperity challenged Cobdenite assumptions of productivity and wage gains from a global division of labour. Most free traders reasoned that a relative scarcity of labour to land meant that wages were higher than in Europe, where land was more scarce in relation to labour. How was it possible, however, for free traders to jettison one economic law whilst preserving another? The journalist and fair trader, Louis Jennings, demanded that free traders address their theoretical inconsistencies:
Are we … to suppose that the great truths of science lose all their force when brought into contact with ‘much land’? Are the United States above the operation of the ‘laws’ of political economy? … What is the use of preaching Free Trade any longer to the Americans, if the economists have now discovered that owing to their ‘much land’ Protection is the proper thing for them?Footnote 144
Whilst free traders never surrendered the conviction that protection had a negative economic impact on America, the republic's unique nature downgraded the economic importance of foreign trade. Especially by the 1900s, a moral and political emphasis became prominent in free trader discourse on America, to compensate for the peculiar circumstances of New World economic development. Marshall's visit to America in 1875 had left him unconvinced that free trade was the only route to prosperity, aware that Britain was not comparable to other countries at different stages of development, but he continued to favour free trade for its moral purity rather than its economic value.Footnote 145 As the Liberal politician, James Bryce, realized, due to the magnitude of its internal trade, ‘the evils which Protection produces in America are not, speaking broadly, economic evils. They are evils of a different kind. They are political evils.’Footnote 146
III
Discussing the tariff issue in 1903, the economist, Arthur Pigou, wrote that ‘one of the things of which Englishmen are proudest is the comparative purity of their political institutions’.Footnote 147 This sense of pride determined how free traders would deal with the peculiar case of the American economy. They used America to warn of the corrupting effects of protection on democracy and liberal values, although a sense of shared liberalism between Britain and the republic provided hope for the future. Amidst a wider national feeling that British politics was morally superior to American politics, free traders were disgusted by the ‘lobbying’, ‘log-rolling’, and ‘wire-pulling’ surrounding American tariffs.Footnote 148 Critical onslaughts on other protectionist countries barely touched the theme of political corruption and tariffs, in comparison to the sinewy relationship between the two observed in America.Footnote 149 The Republican party, and the tariffs it forged in the 1890s, epitomized the excesses of this mercenary politics, and free traders described legislation like the McKinley Tariff as a reward for the Republicans' paymasters, the trusts.Footnote 150
During the Edwardian period, free traders frequently stoked fears of the ‘Americanization of English politics’ under tariff reform, as British society felt increasingly contaminated by the pervasive force of American culture.Footnote 151 The nationalistic aspect of free trade complemented this distaste for American culture.Footnote 152 ‘So you would find men declaring here’, pronounced one speaker, ‘as they have done within the last months in the United States, that they could make much more money at Westminster, or, as the Americans said, at Washington, than they could by staying at home and looking after their own businesses.’Footnote 153 A FTU pamphlet suggested that, just as in America, if a tariff reform government were in power in Britain, ‘the political cry of every Manufacturer would be our trade our politics’.Footnote 154 Shortly after Chamberlain's momentous speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, in which he returned the fiscal question to the forefront of British politics, Churchill warned the Commons that tariff reform would hail a terrible change, ‘not only in historic English Parties, but also in the conditions of public life’. To exemplify the damaging effects tariffs could have on the Conservative party if it became captive to special interests, he envisioned the Conservatives in future as being ‘like perhaps the Republican party in the United States … whose opinions will turn on tariffs, and will cause the lobbies to be crowded with the touts of protected industries’. Churchill's most striking contrast was between the ‘rich, materialist and secular’ Republicans and the ‘old Conservative Party, with its religious convictions and constitutional principles’.Footnote 155 Prominent Liberal politicians said that Britain also had to learn that municipal corruption in America was intertwined with the individualism and money-driven interest politics of protection, for corruption at one level of government simply spread to others.Footnote 156 The socialist MP, John Burns, believed that following the introduction of the Chamberlainite programme ‘the high standard of parliamentary probity that generally prevails will disappear; the American system of lobbying for interests … will be introduced, and Parliament, degraded herself, will drag down the standard of municipal life’.Footnote 157
The assumption that reintroducing protectionism to Britain would create a political culture of lobbying implied that tariffs were inherently corrupting and that the structure of the American political system itself was not at fault. Some free traders did, however, highlight America's unique political structures, and the extent to which the separation of powers complicated budget-making, resulting in persistently high tariffs drawing in revenue and creating budget surpluses from which flowed corruption.Footnote 158 George Baden-Powell, a convinced free trader, regarded American democracy, with sixty million voters and frequent elections, as so expensive that protection was the necessary reward for businesses bankrolling electoral campaigns.Footnote 159 Such explanations left a loophole for fiscal reformers to suggest that tariffs could work in a less corrupt British political environment.Footnote 160
Conversely, the TRL reminded the public that log-rolling and lobbying were already present in Britain under free trade, and were ‘not the products of fiscal policy but of social and political conditions’.Footnote 161 Major Liberal scandals like Marconi, and the Conservative critique of the ‘Radical Plutocracy’ – an arguably anti-Semitic assessment of wealthy, Jewish, Liberal ‘Cosmopolitan Financiers’ – doubtless assisted this line of reasoning.Footnote 162 Fiscal reformers advocated a ‘scientific’ tariff, designed with the specific commercial needs of business in mind, to maintain purity in tariff policy-making,Footnote 163 and cited the American Underwood-Simmons Tariff (1913) as an example of this.Footnote 164 Free traders, however, portrayed ‘scientific’ tariffs as a fallacy. The Liberals informed electors that Americans had found out their scientific tariff was a ‘“crooked” deal’, whereby ‘vested interests line their pockets’.Footnote 165 ‘Nowhere in tariff legislation or administration can “science” or “theory” hold its own against the political “pull” of industrial interests’, wrote Hobson.Footnote 166
At the heart of free trade was Britain's peculiar class structure. Protection was to be avoided because it permitted the state to favour the interests of one class against another,Footnote 167 and free traders framed their moral critique of American protectionism through this lens. They spoke of ‘class enrichment’ and American labour ‘sacrificed to the Moloch of Protection’,Footnote 168 with tariff-fostered trusts robbing workers of their independence by using market power to dictate wages and prices, thus inciting industrial unrest.Footnote 169 Progressives saw a clear nexus in America connecting protection, monopoly, and state violence against labour.Footnote 170 Tension and conflict between labour and capital seemed to be a hallmark of America's protected economy,Footnote 171 whilst free trade represented class-neutrality.Footnote 172
According to Trentmann, free trade appropriated a language of morality, nation, and community, with its popular legitimacy depending more on values of ‘community and cooperation’ than ‘market or competition’.Footnote 173 Trentmann's view is reinforced by focusing on free traders' views of America. For its defenders, free trade preserved Britain's moral purity and community values, which had been degraded in America by protection. As the journalist, Robert Donald, hissed, ‘American Protection rests on the corrupt basis of a rapacious individualism. It is an insidious system of taxation, which discriminates in favour of the rich.’ The people of the United States suffered under ‘the overweening greed and selfishness which is the fundamental basis of Protection of the American kind’.Footnote 174 Even gun violence in American cities could be blamed on the individualism created by protectionism.Footnote 175
Defending free trade, economically, called for an emphasis on the realization of Adam Smith's ideas in the internal American market, but its moral defence required the exact opposite. Far from being a harmony of interests, protection involved the oppression of some citizens for the benefit of others. Free traders conceded that American tariffs temporarily benefited protected industries, but maintained that promotion of class or individual trade interests was achieved only ‘at the expense of the rest of the community’, creating millionaires by extorting the public.Footnote 176 ‘Such an arrangement, when stripped of its disguises’, pondered Gladstone, ‘appears to most of us in the old country an odd foundation on which to build national concord and power.’Footnote 177 American tin tariffs might have benefited the tin industry, said Avebury, but cannery workers had lost their jobs to countries using cheaper imported tin.Footnote 178 It was also widely recognized that American tariffs overwhelmingly benefited the eastern states at the expense of the agrarian west.Footnote 179
It must be emphasized that fiscal reform had its own moral aspect which America helped to reinforce. Tariff reformers demonized free trade as a policy favouring narrow financial interests above producers. Far from articulating a policy of ‘selfishness’, Chamberlain proudly expressed a commitment to the unity and continued existence of the empire, that was imperative to preserving the British ‘character’, sense of mission, and ‘virtue of national sacrifice’.Footnote 180 Prominent tariff reform theorists such as Hewins, W. J. Ashley, and others laid claim to a moral high ground, one also based on the community's welfare, embodied in the nation and above individual interest.Footnote 181 The republic's bold pursuit of national interest through protection, however, never succeeded in populating public discourse to the same extent as allegations of corruption and interest politics.
Before the 1884 Reform Act really embedded itself in British politics, many free traders suggested that American protectionism proved that democracy itself was flawed, permitting a ‘half-educated’ majority ignorant of political economy to steer policy towards heretical doctrines.Footnote 182 Gladstone reconciled orthodox political economy with a wider franchise by excluding class issues from politics.Footnote 183 Following his departure from office, however, free traders began to explain that, in democratic America, protection existed despite the popular will, and not at the working-man's behest, because of the deficiencies of the American political system. Although the American masses naturally preferred free trade, ‘the rigidity of the written constitution’ and the professionalized nature of American political parties, which free traders saw as unresponsive to voters’ needs, meant that the masses were ignored.Footnote 184
Free traders argued that, for its own sake, democracy had to exist under free trade because, as America showed, democratically elected politicians would favour the ‘exclusive interest of the producer’, against the ‘general interest of the consumer’.Footnote 185 ‘The United States of America stand before us an object-lesson of the demoralising effect of protection on the political life of a country governed on democratic principles’, declared Cromer.Footnote 186 Sir Lyon Playfair deemed American tariffs to be a subversion of the democratic state, which was supposed to mean ‘all of us’, with taxes favouring select groups simply a regression to pre-democratic forms of government.Footnote 187
For fiscal reformers, the existence of protectionist democracies validated their cause. As the Sheffield MP, James Hope, said, the American example made it possible to deny any ‘natural connection between Free Trade and Popular Government’.Footnote 188 As Trentmann has shown, free traders polarized the fiscal debate into a conflict between liberalism and despotism;Footnote 189 but America helped fiscal reformers to show that other countries with similar liberal democratic values to Britain found it perfectly possible to reconcile such values with protectionism. ‘How is it that the two most democratic countries – France and America – will not adopt Free Trade’, asked one fair trader, ‘when it is quite in accordance with the principles they profess that they should do so?’Footnote 190
Free traders responded that protection curtailed, rather than co-existed with, Americans' freedom. ‘Though normally the most democratic country in the world’, observed the Liberal MP, Ernest Villiers, ‘the American people do not know what freedom is.’Footnote 191 John Bright and the American free trader, D. A. Wells, even compared slavery and protectionism as examples of American illiberalism.Footnote 192 Such rhetoric failed to convince fiscal reformers. A sardonic Jennings thought it strange that ‘so many thousands of free-born Britons should go year after year to take their place as serfs in the United States, and that every Englishman who lives there, no matter what may be his condition in life, becomes converted to Protection’.Footnote 193
Since America had been admired from the 1880s as an exemplar for Britain of a stable democracy,Footnote 194 free traders could hardly level the kind of criticisms made of protectionist Germany, portrayed as enslaved under a militaristic regime and vulnerable to barbarism and anarchy.Footnote 195 They nevertheless often placed American fiscal policy in the same category as the tyrannical, illiberal policies of the Old World. Cobdenites likened American tariffs, originating in the Civil War, to those imposed by less liberal European governments, including the Corn Laws, for all were examples of the state oppressing the people to fund warfare.Footnote 196 Churchill even categorized American tariffs alongside German conscription and the Russian police state.Footnote 197
The American system also represented collectivism and economic dependence on the state.Footnote 198 The rise of large corporations in the United States demonstrated how protection jeopardized the position of the independent entrepreneur, the keystone of economic liberalism. Looking across the Atlantic, Churchill foresaw a moral crisis facing British manufacturers were tariff reform to succeed.
Here and there no doubt individuals will make great fortunes, and we shall grow a Rockefeller or a Pierpont Morgan on our own. But the small producer is very likely to lose and to be absorbed, as many have been in America and Germany, in some great and greedy combine, and instead of being an independent producer standing on his own legs he will find himself a salaried servant of some great syndicate.Footnote 199
Gladstone regarded America as a liberal nation which had strayed from righteousness, and his belief in the Anglo-Saxon people's ‘love for political liberty’ permitted an optimism that it would eventually follow Britain's commercial example.Footnote 200 Indeed, for those Cobdenites with the grandest vision of the future, it was to be Brother Jonathan, not John Bull, who would lead the world as its guiding liberal light. The cosmopolitan heart of Cobdenism always represented the sacrifice of power for wealth and welfare, and Cobden had himself accepted that America would supersede Britain.Footnote 201 This willingness to sacrifice national greatness in the name of ideology led neo-mercantilists to admire the economic patriotism of the McKinley Tariff.Footnote 202 Cobdenism, however, transcended national boundaries. In the late nineteenth century, free traders believed that America's tariffs, by exerting a powerfully negative effect on the global economy, showed a current disregard for other nations and the liberal order.Footnote 203 In 1890, Gladstone engaged in a debate over free trade and protection with the American secretary of state, James G. Blaine, in the pages of the North American Review. In arguably the most profound, heartfelt, and impassioned passage of the entire fiscal debate, Gladstone tried to persuade the American nation that, with its economic power, came great moral responsibility to set an example to the world. By shunning economic nationalism and following a divinely sanctioned fiscal policy, America would become ‘a leader and teacher to us of the old world’ against the ‘miserable degrading sophistries’ of Satan.Footnote 204 As one Liberal hoped, America's example would put an end to European militarism, ‘and with it would vanish the demon of Protection’.Footnote 205
By the 1890s, as predictions that the excesses of the McKinley Tariff would spell the end of protectionism proved overly optimistic, and as talk of British decline increased, free trade reconciled itself to the fact of American protectionism. When the bonds between Liberal elites and their American counterparts weakened in the Edwardian years,Footnote 206 free trade became less a global ambition and more a progressive plank of a domestically focused New Liberalism. As American tariff reduction made significant headway with Underwood-Simmons in 1913, however, free traders found the Whiggish view of their creed's eventual global triumph finally validated. ‘It would, indeed, be the height of folly for us to abandon Free Trade in favour of Protection at a time when the whole movement is away from Protection, and in the direction of fewer, rather than more, trade barriers.’Footnote 207 Free traders considered the accompanying income tax a good omen, mimicking the changes wrought by Peel himself.Footnote 208 Yet America was still far from what Gladstone envisioned, and even its great post-1945 effort at liberalization would be achieved through reciprocity and multilateral institutions, rather than through unilateral moral example.Footnote 209
IV
The centrality of the United States to the fiscal debate was largely determined by its economic peculiarity. America was unique in possessing a vast agricultural surplus, an abundance of land, and a huge and varied internal market swollen by wave after wave of working-age immigrants. The influx of cheap American grain to Britain, combined with the affront to international trade of high protectionism, motivated supporters of imperial preference to a degree not hitherto appreciated by historians. Free traders were however undoubtedly correct to downplay the role of tariffs in American development. The reasons for the rise of the American tinplate industry, for instance, arguably could be equally attributed to the emigration of skilled tinplate workers from South Wales as to the McKinley Tariff.Footnote 210 Contemporaries on both sides were also correct to highlight factors such as education and mass production for a large domestic market.Footnote 211 Abundance of land meant scarce and expensive labour, which encouraged more capital-intensive, higher productivity manufacturing than in Britain.Footnote 212
The American economy nevertheless posed tremendous political difficulties to free traders, forcing them to combat the American example on a politico-moral basis. The United States' unique economic experience thus played a significant role in underpinning the very character of free trade, as expounded by Howe and Trentmann. America helped free traders to illustrate the potentially negative effects of dispensing with free trade on Britain's own liberal democracy, and thus assisted in free trade's shift from elite economic doctrine to popular political creed for a mass electorate.
The fiscal debate was subject to many international comparisons and influences. As Britain's greatest industrial challengers, Germany and the United States were the most prominent in discussions of the merits of different fiscal systems. However, America's prominence, in particular, tells us much about the transmission of knowledge and ideas relating to foreign fiscal systems. Visits to the United States, and contributions to the press from Americans and British emigrants, demonstrate the importance to the tariff question of the global, English-speaking bond. This becomes clear when one considers the frequent comparisons made between free trade New South Wales and protectionist Victoria during the 1880s and 1890s, whereby knowledge and ideas were transmitted in similar fashion to the ‘Mother Country’ from other lands of the British diaspora.Footnote 213 A shared language and cultural and political heritage made the English-speaking world a natural source of powerful influences upon one of Britain's most contentious political debates.
Furthermore, the American example helps to demonstrate the increasingly important role in contemporary economic debate of statistical evidence and its international transmission through official channels and the press. The country was relatively precocious in producing official labour statistics, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics established in 1884 predating its German and British equivalents by eight and nine years respectively.Footnote 214 The increasing availability of price, wage, and employment data meant that the fiscal debate could move away from economic generalities to a more empirically informed stage. Far from contradicting this article's emphasis on the importance of moral arguments, statistics assisted both sides in their attempt to hold the moral high ground, for any proof that the desired fiscal policy could materially benefit the working-class consumer, and not merely serve narrow interests, was of vital importance in trying to win the fiscal debate.
