The title of Marc-William Palen’s strenuously argued and impressively well-documented monograph is a rebuttal to a sixty-five-year-old article, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s classic “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” That article influentially advanced the concept of “informal empire,” an idea that was picked up in the United States by the Wisconsin school of diplomatic history. The concept of informal empire asserted that, in place of military conquest, powerful nations often tried to dominate foreign populations by determining the terms on which other people traded, breaking open their markets and forcing them into “free trade.”

Palen attacks this idea from a few angles. He argues that such a concept is historically defective: across the second half of the nineteenth century, economic nationalism was the political economic companion of imperialism; free traders, to the contrary, almost always opposed territorial expansion. Palen also demonstrates that a tendency to see something sinister behind free trade in fact arises from the “Anglophobia” that protectionists in the United States and other nations used to maintain high tariffs during the nineteenth century’s second half. Free trade, those protectionists charged, was a British plot; lowering tariffs would only benefit Britain, not the home country. Palen insinuates that this conspiracism has continued to infect scholarship on free trade, seeing it as an ideological mask for a subtler imperialism. Palen wants to resurrect the intellectual validity of Victorian free-trade arguments.

Finally, Palen’s title and argument are intended not only to say that the link between imperialism and free trade is wrong and conspiratorial, but also that its wrongness and conspiracy-mindedness has been the product of nationalistic blinkers. British diplomatic historians have seldom appreciated how strongly the United Kingdom and the colonies were affected by U.S. trade policy and how changes in that policy forced reconsiderations and the emergence of a potent economic nationalist opposition within Canada and even Britain itself. U.S. diplomatic historians, meanwhile, have tended to see partisan wrangling over the tariff as more interest driven than idea driven, underrating the significance of U.S. free-trade intellectuals and assuming a thicker ideological unity in U.S. politics than there really was. Palen is especially intent to show that Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms as president brought a genuine departure from protectionist Republican trade policies and that those changes in turn led to an abrupt cessation of imperialistic expansion.

Palen’s idea-driven approach to the conflict between free trade and protectionism has advantages and disadvantages. Palen’s wide reading in the pamphlets and journals of fifty years of intense debate give him a strong sense of the ways that episodes connected over time, yielding a composite picture of two highly distinct groups of policy entrepreneurs, to which he refers throughout as “Listians” and “Cobdenites,” after Friedrich List and Richard Cobden. These terms give far more precision both to the sets of ideas and to the groups of intellectuals espousing them than do the traditional labels “protectionism” and “free trade.”

On the other hand, Palen’s heavy emphasis on words over deeds allows crucial issues to escape his notice when they are not obviously present in the pamphlets or articles he is reading. More seriously, Palen’s book is what a study of imperialism looks like with race left out; he discusses the role “Anglo-Saxonism” played in uniting free-trade intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, but he treats it as a benign ideology dedicated to peaceful economic integration (see especially p. 252). That is not an accurate portrayal. Similarly, his handling of the history of Hawaii (pp. 254–258) reveals a certain factitiousness in his distinction between what he calls “the imperialism of economic nationalism” and the “anti-imperialism of free trade.” Palen sharply contrasts the administration of Benjamin Harrison, which wanted to formally annex Hawaii, and the Cleveland administration, which blocked annexation and wanted to transform it into a demilitarized free-trade zone. Looked at from the pages of the North American Review, this distinction meant a great deal, and unquestionably, the presence or absence of destroyers in Hawaiian ports was significant. But considered from the point of view of native Hawaiians, both arrangements trampled indigenous sovereignty; both assumed the rights of other nations to determine the status and fate of the islands.

Taking that point of view puts us back at square one: the inevitable concept of informal empire. Palen’s study breaks new ground in reconstructing with much greater depth and sensitivity the intellectual debate that undergirded the interminable legislative wrangling of trade policy. His transatlantic frame for this debate refreshes many well-known episodes and puts them in new light. But his assertion of a clear difference between the ideas of Listians and Cobdenites does not prove that the concept of informal empire is false or unnecessary. Sixty-five years of scholarship on informal empire may be many things, but it is not a conspiracy.