For a long time the somniferous qualities of the economic debate over free trade and protection in British public policy has been a given. This view has been under challenge over the past decade, and Frank Trentmann's attempt to narrate what he calls a “human history” of free trade (14) constitutes another rousing wake-up call.

In the thirty years after the conclusion of the French wars, a campaign for free trade raged in Britain. This crusade gave the nation its first modern pressure group, the Anti–Corn Law League, dealt a body blow to the lingering ancien régime by undermining a vital source of aristocratic power, and heralded an age when, as Richard Cobden suggested to the Tory prime minister Robert Peel, government had to be conducted with the consent of the middle classes. By 1850, free trade had become normative in British politics, regarded as the key to prosperity at home and peace abroad and securely rooted both in the canon of mainstream liberalism and in the agenda of working-class politics.

The national commitment to free trade withstood the challenges at home and abroad of all comers (from protectionists of various stripes to imperial federationists), reaching its high point in Edwardian Britain. Free trade was the “popular ticket,” “uniquely central to democratic culture and national identity” (3). Beyond economics, free trade was a moral touchstone, central to Britain's sense of its civilizing mission and, at the same time, putting the citizen-consumer at the center of the political imagination. War and depression changed everything. Free trade neither prevented war nor warded off economic hardship. Other solutions quickly gained ground. By the 1930s doctrinaire free traders appeared as out of touch with reality as the Tory cranks who had clung to protection during the 1850s.

In charting this story (or at least the latter part of it), Trentmann has written an excellent book, extensively and meticulously researched, thoughtful, nuanced, and eloquent. The book is at its best when exploring the everyday contest over free trade. Trentmann's discussion of the seaside campaign of 1910 is a case in point. Defying bylaws intended to preserve the “neutrality” of these “virgin lands,” free traders “invaded the sands and piers, competing with ice-cream vendors, fortune tellers, and minstrel signers for the attention of the perambulating tourist” (109). The results were impressive: eighty-seven meetings at Brighton, five on the Isle of Wight, eighty-five in the west of Scotland, and over a hundred in Devon and Cornwall (110). The seaside campaign was, Trentmann tells us, indicative of a “re-energised political culture, interactive and face-to-face,” a distinctive and self-conscious attempt to harness entertainment and spectacle as tools of political communication (112, 114). Similarly, Trentmann's discussion of the 160 “dump shops” fitted out by tariff reformers in 1910 takes us the heart of the campaign on the streets of British towns and cities. Fitted out with foreign goods dumped on the British consumer to illustrate the rising cost of living under free trade, the shops, like the seaside lectures, were designed to appeal to the instincts and impulses of everyday politics.

Trentmann's joy of discovery is infectious, but it is also responsible for one of the book's few drawbacks. Often what is portrayed as a groundbreaking contribution to the repertoire of political action was in fact a continuation of a strategy developed by earlier generations of agitators. Much of the ritual, theater, and fervor he lovingly describes were well-established features of the social culture of politics by the time that The Times described the Anti–Corn Law League as “a great fact” in British public life in 1843. The same is true, too, of the book's methodological claims. Trentmann's boast to have written a “new history of politics” (19) overlooks many fine studies of the “pressure from without,” including those of the antislavery campaign, Chartism, the Anti–Corn Law League, and the peace movement.

The failure to give what was called the league's “engine of political warfare” either due credit or attention is indicative of a broader neglect of the development of free trade (both as an idea and as a campaign) during the first half of the nineteenth century. The period leading up to the well-known dinner in 1902 at which, according to Winston Churchill, Joe Chamberlain declared that tariffs were a “priceless secret” that would occupy the political debates of the near future, is essentially an extended foreword. The phrase “Modern Britain” in the subtitle is thus conveniently vague; in reality, the book's focus is on the vicissitudes of the free-trade nation after the turn of the century.

Finally, Trentmann, not unlike many students of single-issue campaigns, is sometimes guilty of overemphasizing the importance of his subject. The fate of free trade took its place on an agenda crowded with other issues: the burgeoning European arms race, the intransigence of the House of Lords, and Ireland all press for a place at center stage.

None of these quibbles, however, detract from what is undoubtedly a book of enduring importance, which has, somewhat paradoxically, finally lain to rest the notion that the struggle for free trade was in any way soporific.