In his 1933 Yale Review essay on “national self-sufficiency,” John Maynard Keynes famously reneged on his earlier belief in free trade. A careful endorsement of economic nationalism, the essay is also a reflection on an earlier generation of free traders who “counted among the most idealistic and disinterested of men” (and, it turns out, a great deal of women too), but whose beliefs were now being tested to the limit by the return of economic conflict and the emergence of state communism and fascism.Footnote ¹ Keynes uses a slightly mocking tone towards “those who cling to the old ideas” but who “in no country of the world today can be reckoned as a serious force,” and while Keynes’ readers would have readily recognized these idealistic and peace-loving free traders, they are much less familiar figures one hundred years later. “Free trade” is indeed more likely to conjure up the heady days of neoliberal globalization and the Washington Consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s.

But support for free trade was never only the preserve of neoliberals or earlier liberal imperialists. As Marc-William Palen reminds us in his widely read book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free-Trade World, a motley group of radical liberals and socialist internationalists once saw eye to eye in their quest for a world at peace and free of high tariffs. They were peace activists, politicians, thinkers, men and women who shared ambitious, if not utopian, “visions of a free-trade world.” This intellectual history shines new light on this neglected story and has correspondingly attracted a great deal of attention.Footnote ² In a world of rampant neo-mercantile reaction, with trade wars our quotidian lot, Pax Economica offers reassuring news for shell-shocked liberals. “Our current neo-mercantilist moment, should it continue,” Palen writes, “might spell the beginning of the end of the post-Cold War neoliberal regime. But neoliberalism’s demise might also open the door once again to left-wing globalist dreams of Pax Economica” (p. 222). If paperback back cover blurbs are any indication, many seem to find comfort in this hopeful note.

Pax Economica sits at the intersection of peace studies, histories of economic thought, and historical scholarship on trade and international economic governance. Companions of this book might count Frank Trentmann’s book on the free trade movement in Britain as well as Thomas W. Zeiler’s more recent account of “American Free-Trade Internationalism.”Footnote ³ With economic nationalism on the rise, this book is timelier than ever and may also be read in conjunction with Eric Helleiner’s intellectual history of neo-mercantilism, Arnaud Orain’s analysis of the ebbs and flows of the “capitalism of finitude,” and the flurry of recent trade books and articles on the history of economic nationalism and trade wars.Footnote ⁴ It also speaks to recent works on the role of women in international relations, and while Palen’s story isn’t exactly without men, it has at least the merit of bringing to the fore a largely forgotten history of “Free Trade Feminism” by highlighting women’s “Fight for Free Trade, Anti-Imperialism, and Peace.”Footnote ⁵

The book is divided into six thematic chapters whose chronological span runs from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, although the crux of the narrative focuses on the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. These six chapters present, in turn, an intellectual history of economic nationalism from the mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, a history of Richard Cobden and his radical liberal followers, an account of the “socialist internationalist free-trade tradition,” a history of the confluence between feminist struggles and the free trade cause, a history of the Christian commercial peace movement, and finally an analysis of how the free-trade-and-peace movement fared in “the increasingly militant and exploitative post-1945 geopolitical landscape” and the rise of neoliberalism. Chapter 1 helps to set the stage because it introduces the economic nationalists who, according to Palen, would have found themselves at loggerheads with the “left-wing” groups described in the book. It reminds the reader of what was in fact the norm in the late nineteenth-century global economy: tariffs, protectionism, wars of colonial expansion, an era of imperialism and economic nationalism that mirrors our current day of trade wars and economic conflict.

In contrast, Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 then offer intricate galleries of portraits where the reader gets to meet all kinds of “left-wing cosmopolitan idealists” (p. 53), notably Richard Cobden (1804–1865) and his followers, who either shared or sympathized with his liberal radical “critique of imperialism and war” (p. 65). The year 1860 is presented as an early apogee in Chapter 2, not least because 1860 was also the year of the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty between France and Britain, which “ushered in a brief era of European trade liberalization” (p. 59). Yet it is worth noting that Michel Chevalier, Cobden’s French counterpart, the chief economic advisor of Napoleon III and arguably one of the most underappreciated French economists of the nineteenth century, never saw free trade and protectionism as strictly antithetical, and the treaty was not the undisputed triumph of liberalism that it has often been portrayed to be. While he only receives passing mention in this book, Chevalier was a crucial voice in the international free trade movement and a strong believer in the idea that more commercial exchange leads to greater peace. Yet he thought that, in the French case at least, free trade would have to be complemented by robust industrial policy. “Free trade” in Chevalier’s mind was a way of “injecting a healthy dose of foreign competition” to supercharge production and industrial development in France, not a dogmatic philosophical and moral commitment.Footnote ⁶ He was also, as Palen acknowledges, a supporter of French colonization in Algeria (p. 62). By drawing too stark a division between protectionism and free trade, and by making it the central dichotomy in the book, Palen runs the risk of brushing off important figures who do not fully fit into his category of anti-imperial left-wing free traders.

Other contemporaries of Cobden, and especially later loyal followers receive more sustained attention, however. “One new left-wing Cobdenite anti-imperial offshoot that made a big global splash at the turn of the century,” Palen tells us, “was what became known in the United States as the ‘single tax’ movement or Georgism, stemming from the liberal radical theories of US journalist and political economist Henry George” (p. 72). The centrality of Henry George (1839–1897) and Georgism to Palen’s characters, including many of the feminist and Christian activists described in Chapters 3 and 4, is a fascinating finding and exposes the fact that free trade advocacy was never only about international trade and peace, but that it was also, and not least, about domestic social justice. Palen rightly puts the emphasis on the “anti-imperial effects” of George’s single tax ideas (p. 73), but according to Henry George himself, commercial free trade was only a stepping stone. “In itself the abolition of protection is like the driving off of a robber,” he wrote in Protection or Free Trade (1886), “but it will not help a man to drive off one robber, if another, still stronger and more rapacious, be left to plunder him” and this other, more powerful robber was none other, in George’s view, than “private property in land” itself.Footnote ⁷ “True free trade” was thus always more capacious than what Cobden had imagined—even his “free trade in land” idea and “require[d] that the active factor of production, Labor, shall have free access to the passive factor of production, Land” (p.74). “To secure this,” George wrote, “all monopoly of land must be broken up, and the equal right of all to the use of the natural elements must be secured by the treatment of the land as the common property in usufruct of the whole people.”Footnote ⁸ Such a radical proposal was presumably much more consequential than commercial free trade, and although progressive tax scholars have often disparaged George’s proposals, it had at least “everywhere done yeoman’s service in emphasizing the question of unjust privilege” and had the merit of contributing to a “revolt against inequality.”Footnote ⁹

Palen makes sure to clarify in Chapter 3 that Marx and Engels’ qualified support for free trade was pragmatic because they saw it as “a progressive condition of industrial capitalism, moving it a step closer to socialist revolution” (p. 96). For the broader Manchester–Marx tradition, free trade “was seen as the next progressive step towards a socialist Pax Economica” rather than “in itself the desired end.” However, it is not always entirely clear whether the liberal activists depicted in Palen’s book—Orthodox Cobdenites, Georgists, Norman Angellists—were primarily interested in free trade as an instrument of international peace or if their goal was in fact “true” free trade in the Georgist sense. For instance, did the Belgian “orthodox Cobdenite” Henri Lambert, the author of Pax Economica (1918), support free trade for the same reasons his International Free Trade League (IFTL) single taxer comrades did (pp. 84–85)? And what would be the implications if not?

This book is both a work of historical recovery and an invitation to expand the horizons of economic thinking on the left today.Footnote ¹⁰ It might thus be worth considering what the reincarnations of the “free trade” cause of the late nineteenth century could look like in a world where fiscal states have a much larger margin of maneuver. After all, as Palen notes, “free trade and protectionism [. . .] had meanings particular to the century preceding the Second World War.” “This was a time,” he explains, “when governments relied largely on tariffs for generating revenue,” but if other sources of revenue had been available, the debate between free trade and protection may not have been so central (p. 5)Footnote ¹¹ Could it be that free trade was such a potent slogan and cause in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—an era of small fiscal states, regressive taxation, and high inequality—because it carried radical domestic implications that then faded over time and had arguably disappeared by the time of its neoliberal hollowing out? By the late interwar period already, the promise of social justice and peace through free trade had lost at least some of its appeal and seriousness, dixit Keynes. In addition to the rise of fascism, mounting evidence that freer trade had not brought peace and the emergence of illiberal alternatives to democratic capitalism, did higher taxes and the advent of mass democracy and enfranchisement after WWI have anything to do with this? Perhaps tellingly, Palen’s activists were turning in greater numbers to the supranational realm in the wake of WWI and/or doubling down with greater radicality on economic cosmopolitanism.Footnote ¹² What does this tell us about where the center of gravity of progressive politics had shifted by then? It might also explain why the cast of characters surveyed during the post-1945 era, with the notable exception of Cordell Hull, were not as prominent and influential as their turn-of-the-century and early interwar forebears and “once more found themselves on the outside looking in” (p. 191).

Regardless, this voyage “among the most idealistic and disinterested of men” and women remains a salutary endeavor and it is difficult not to see the relevance of this history for “our current neo-mercantilist moment” (p. 218). While left-wing visions of a world at peace today certainly continue to be concerned with social justice, radical land reform would probably not hold similar pride of place. And yet given that we live in a “new Gilded Age,” the outrage that once fueled Georgists’ civic engagement could once again prove powerful and energize, for instance, calls for stronger domestic and global tax justice, if not a full-fledged “Plan for Equality & Prosperity Within Planetary Boundaries.”Footnote ¹³ Such visions would thus be much more attentive to the environmental costs of global trade. “Free trade” can now hardly be envisaged without attention to the food security of nations in the Global South and the viability of global supply chains in an age of recurring extreme climate events and “planetary boundaries.”Footnote ¹⁴ The “visions of a free trade world” described in Marc-William Palen’s book once seemed desirable in a world of infinite growth, but is this still the world we live in?