The Introduction sets out the question and the scope of this book, and its theoretical and methodological framework. Drawing on historical materialism, it explains the anti-fetishist understanding of information taken by this book, which treats information as embedded in and constitutive of social relations and implicated in the distribution of power and order-making. Based on this historical materialist understanding of information, the Introduction sets out the book’s critique on the liberal treatment of information and its main argument that human rights and free trade have jointly and dialectically formed a hegemonic conceptual framework for the governance of information under international law which obscures the crucial material dimension of information and its connection to power.

When it was founded in 1819, Singapore represented the farthest reach of British imperial authority, and in 1824, the British and Dutch conspired to create a unique kind of border, lacing its way through maritime space, and allotting cartographic spheres to both parties. The major political effect of this division was the dismemberment of the Johor maritime empire. Its core, the Riau-Lingga Archipelago, became a laxly administered buffer zone for Dutch Batavia, while its dual-sovereign head—the sultan and the temenggong—landed, impoverished, on the British side in Singapore. Thus, this maritime empire gave way to a vacuous frontier-zone between two European rivals, each incapable of exercising the authority they claimed. This was the new site of ‘piracy’, as it had been for Hugo Grotius two centuries before; however, this time it was indigenous seafarers—not rival Europeans—who stood accused of rejecting the freedom of the seas.

In early twentieth century, there were widespread demands for increased tariffs and other barriers. However, by 1906, a relatively open trading system had stabilised. The victory of the Liberals in the British election in 1906 and their commitment to free trade, as well as to the German government’s management of its trade policy, culminating in trade treaties from 1904, shaped this outcome. The defeat of proposals for higher trade barriers resulted not only from economic considerations, but also geopolitical ones. British Liberals argued that a free trade empire was more secure than one surrounded by tariff barriers, while German leaders recognised that trade was an essential element of German power. Debates about trade were transnational. The outcomes reduced trade as a source of political tension and weakened the argument that securing markets required military and naval force. Austria-Hungary tried to use commercial pressure to influence Serbia, but the subsequent ‘Pig War’ saw Serbia diversify its commercial partners, an achievement that was partly possible because of the defeat of those calling for trade barriers in Britain and Germany.

This chapter examines the role of tariffs and quotas in international trade law, focusing on their regulation within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organization. While often associated with free trade, these legal frameworks primarily discipline rather than prohibit protectionism, favouring tariffs as the more acceptable instrument. The chapter traces the evolution of tariffs as the preferred trade barrier, contrasting them with the general prohibition on quotas. It also discusses the complexities of tariff application, including classification, valuation, and origin determination. Finally, it considers the future of tariffs and quotas, and the challenges of achieving full trade liberalisation without regulatory harmonisation to prevent regulatory arbitrage.

This chapter examines the political economy of international trade policy, exploring the evolution of the international trading system from the GATT to the WTO. It analyses the fault lines between free trade and fair trade and winners and losers, and the role of labour market policies in addressing transition costs. It also discusses the challenges facing the WTO, including institutional dysfunction and an expanding mandate. It proposes potential solutions, such as plurilateral agreements and improved institutional arrangements, while emphasising the need for collaboration with other international agencies. The chapter concludes by stressing the urgency of recovering the aspirations of the post-war international order to address current global challenges.

This chapter examines the paradoxical success of the most demanding form of market integration, the Single Market established in 1992, which is based on the federalisation of numerous pieces of legislation. It is surprising that twelve European states, among the richest in the world, felt the need to link their markets so closely, even though they could have perfectly well continued alone. The creation of a unified market gradually became the central aspect of European cooperation between 1919 (when Keynes first aired his ideas on this topic) and 1957. The countermodel of the British-style free trade area (FTA) emerged as a major alternative but it failed. A genuine Single Market was established in the late 1980s. It had three striking features. First, it was put in place quickly between 1987 and 1992, enabling the unprecedented opening of the Union’s internal borders. Second, liberalisation was accompanied by enhanced regulation, in accordance with the oxymoron ‘freer market, more rules’, including a surprising rise of federal competition policy. Third, this move was opposed by several neoliberal figures, such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s.

American “free-produce” advocates insisted that purchasers of goods made from slave cotton shared fully in the enslaver’s criminality. In fact, they emphasized that this crime-tainted cotton, moving from field to fabric, damned every commercial agent along the transatlantic chain connecting the enslaver to the consumer. The first half of the chapter examines these advocates’ vision of market complicity and their conviction that slave cotton remained morally toxic across its market life. The second half focuses on the rejection of this vision by William Lloyd Garrison, once a supporter of the Free Produce movement. Garrison came to view cotton abstinence as impracticable and marginal to the work of abolition. Remarkably, he argued that free markets and commercial transactions scrubbed slave cotton of moral contamination. Because they were commodities, slave-cotton goods were morally benign and thus “perfectly innocent” to consume.

Chapter 1 revisits Goethe’s endorsement of a “free trade of sentiments and ideas” in the light of the free trade discourses of his age. First, I dissect these discourses’ complexity and doctrinal incoherence in eighteenth-nineteenth-century British, French, and German political economy. Then I explore the ambivalences in Goethe’s vague suggestion about a free trade world literature by addressing his peculiar attitude to commerce, his reminiscences of the administrative economics of Cameralism based on the heritage of the self-sustaining Aristotelian household, his aversions to modern finance, and his nostalgia for the medieval trade fair. Based on these decidedly antiquated considerations informing his understanding of the mediums, sites, and agents of commercial and intellectual exchange, I suggest that as opposed to Marx’s approach to world literature as an offspring of modern industrial capitalism, Goethe’s views were bound up with pre-modern merchant capitalism.

Between 1500 and 1700, the right of groups and nations to trade were conceptualised and even enacted through a range of legal claims and practices. It is nevertheless possible and useful to make some generalisations about the rise and fall of the military, economic, political, religious and legal powers of various states and their conceptualisations of the right to trade. The primary texts bring out two salient distinctions, concerning the collective right to trade. Some commentators argued that the right to trade was limitable, while others considered it non-derogable. Another group of texts grounded the right to trade primarily in divine law, while others emphasised natural, international or municipal law.

Africa and Europe have had an economic partnership for decades, first around the notion of friendship, then, since the 2000s, around the idea of solidarity. Despite this moral rhetoric, Europe is sanctuarizing itself, cultivating an anti-migratory fantasy and working for a resolute control of African migration. This policy is formalized with the “readmission clause,” whereby certain African immigrants are being posed as unassimilable, undesirable and disposable because they are useless for the neoliberal productive order. Therefore, any flight from exploitation on the continent must be blocked. As this perspective has led to extensive violations and aroused criticism and opposition, this chapter proposes, no longer a hybrid ideology but care. By means of a reading of the history of ideas, we insist on the impasse of the perspective that rejects migration in the name of autochthony. We propose a utopia: to work for the access of all peoples to the general cycle of industrial civilizations; this will bring equality between peoples who will negotiate migrations, taking into account concrete forms of solidarity.

For Alden Young and Tinashe Nyamunda, development as a right did no more to further decolonization processes. Rather, development served as a “common language through which both the former colonizers and the ascendant nationalist elites could speak to one another,” setting the stage for “an imperialism of free trade” rather than promoting the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. If decolonization processes remain incomplete as many contributors to this section suggest, so too do aspirational processes of political and economic freedom expressed in the language of rights as racial equality, self-determination, and economic sovereignty.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of trade and globalization in Europe, focusing on the forces that have shaped trade patterns over time. It explores the impact of technological advancements, such as improvements in transportation and communication, as well as the influence of political decisions on trade policy, including cycles of protectionism and free trade. The chapter also discusses the economic benefits and challenges of globalization, analysing how trade has contributed to economic growth while also creating winners and losers within and between countries. The chapter argues that while globalization has generally increased economic efficiency, its effects have been unevenly distributed.