Anthony Howe

Popular Political Economy

In a remarkable discursive revolution, a variety of economic languages (customary, mercantilist, protectionist, proto-socialist) which competed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were replaced in early Victorian Britain by a ‘hegemonic’ language of liberal political economy at whose centre lay not an abstract concept of the market but a popular notion of free trade. This common language had largely united elite and popular political worlds by the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a powerful supra-party value, which remained uniquely dominant in British political culture before 1914, despite the emergence of powerful alternatives on both the right and the left.1 In part this political language possessed a coherent content deriving from a canonical body of economic doctrine (‘the laws of political economy’) whose diffusion had in turn marginalised competing economic languages. Yet its appeal extended beyond its scientific authority, for it resonated with a whole range of different languages, ranging from those of religion, where free trade became part of a providential vision of order and redemption, to patriotism, for free trade was easily melded into the birthright of the ‘free-born Englishman’, as readily traceable in the Saxon realm of King Offa as it was in the pages of Smith’s Wealth of Nations.2 It also proved malleable, responsive to changing economic idioms, but also able to incorporate new languages such as that of Darwinism, whose intellectual genesis was intimately linked to that of political economy.3

‘Friends of moderate opinions’: Italian political thought in 1859 in a British Liberal mirror

Abstract This comment on Romani (above) emphasizes the degree to which British reactions to events in Italy in 1859 were widely conditioned by the similarities leading Liberals identified with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These included an emphasis on monarchy, despite a distrust of Piedmont’s dynastic and military alliance with Napoleon III, and on the leading part of an enlightened aristocracy, promoting constitutional liberty as an alternative to both revolution and absolutism. In this perspective, the Italian moderates were widely appraised as true ‘sons of England’.

Radicalism, Free Trade, and Foreign Policy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain

At first sight few events in British history appear so determined by domestic considerations as the gradual introduction of policies of free trade, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, itself the outcome of a long struggle between the Anti-Corn Law League and the aristocracy, between Whig and Tory, and not least between Liberal Tory and Protectionist Tory. Such policies have normally been seen as the logical counterpart to Britain’s primacy in industrialisation, determined by the need to export manufactured goods, to feed a growing non-rural population, and to make some concession towards the ascendant power of the ‘cotton lords’.1 Britain’s adoption of free trade appears therefore unpromising terrain in which to demonstrate the primacy of considerations of foreign policy, and seems to conform far more to the view expressed (albeit in a different context) by Churchill, that principles which are affirmed by a nation in domestic politics ‘have always governed, and will always govern, the character and conduct of external affairs’.2

State versus market in the early historiography of the industrial revolution in Britain c.1890–1914

Abstract This article reveals how the emerging historiography of industrialisation in Britain moulded a lasting division between two explanations of its origins, one emphasising discontinuity, individual enterprise, and free markets, the other evolutionary change, the role of the state and the importance of empire. Both views were historically informed but led in contrary directions in the highly polarised politics of early twentieth-century Britain, the former linked to support for free trade and liberalism as the basis of economic welfare, the latter to support for Conservative tariff reform and imperial reconstruction.

British Liberalism and the Legacy of Saint-Simon : the Case of Richard Cobden

This article examines the important engagement of the British liberal Richard Cobden (1804-1865) with the ‘practical socialism’ of Saint-Simonism. Cobden established close personal ties with leading Saint-Simonians, but what particularly drew them together was a common vision of free trade, peace, and global economic progress. This ideological affinity led to close practical cooperation in schemes such as the Anglo- French commercial Treaty of 1860 but they remained fundamentally divided on the value of colonies. Here Cobden’s liberal belief in the self-organisation of society through individual freedom clashed with the Saint-Simonian readiness to promote the civilizational benefits of colonial domination.

Book Review: The Global Economy 1944-2000: The Limits of Ideology

neglected vistas, but these chapters still have much food for thought. Both thinkers confronted imperialism in more abstract terms than Diderot, but Muthu nevertheless identifies through their writings an important trope in European thought, which eighteenth-century thinkers seldom confronted in the same depth, or with the same directness, as Kant or Herder. The author’s reading of Kant and Herder leads him directly to the problem of nomadic societies, and their place – or, usually, not – in the history of civilized nations. The study concludes with a chapter on Herder, for Herder almost alone wrestled with the dilemma of how to reconcile the continued choice of peoples to pursue a nomadic existence with concepts of a ladder of progression, from unsettled to urban life, so deeply imbedded in western thought at the time, and for over a century to come. It is less the conclusions Herder, or Muthu, actually reach that provoke most thought, than the intellectual struggle to answer questions focusing on what ‘humanity’ actually was for enlightened thinkers: where does it part company from their notions of ‘civilization’ or ‘the good life’? In this way, Enlightenment Against Empire is a thought-provoking book, rich in perspectives. Muthu has read the texts with such care as to justify his extensive use of quotations, while his three protagonists are thematically integrated into an interesting whole. What is missing, however, is the wider context of contemporary thinking on imperialism. Muthu begins by acknowledging that he is discussing a minority line of argument which did not prevail. Nor was it sufficiently polemical to drive a meaningful rift between Diderot and Voltaire, a decided and coherent exponent of a very different view, that of civil society as politesse et police. As such, Enlightenment Against Empire does not really set the polemic in its full context. The answer to the author’s own question, as to why this current of anti-imperialist thought did not survive into the early nineteenth century, may lie – at least in part – in the fact that it was not deemed central enough to the ‘enlightenment project’ to sow deep discords among its leading lights. Here, one thinks of the unjustly neglected Michelle Duchet’s seminal Anthropologie et Histoire au siècle des lumières, published in 1971, which discusses the pro-imperialist, ‘one-fits-all’ school of thought against which Diderot, Kant and Herder all swam, and against which Muthu might have pitted them more directly.