Marc-William Palen. Pax Economica. Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. Princeton University Press, Princeton [etc.] 2024. 309 pp. Ill. $35.00; £30.00. (E-book: $24.50/£21.00.)
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Given the resurgence of Trumpian tariff protectionism, it is certainly not an overstatement to call this book's publication timely.Marc-William Palen from the University of Exeter aims to remind his readers of the intellectual origins of free-trade cosmopolitanism and the forgotten left-wing roots of free-trade thought and activism that reach back into the mid-nineteenth century.As he outlines in the introduction, the author understands his book both as a historical study of this intellectual tradition and as a historically grounded intervention that offers readers a fresh perspective on contemporary debates about economic globalization.Writing with evident sympathy for his protagonists, the author aims "to correct a historical imbalance" by highlighting the nineteenth-century leftist counter-current that, as he describes it, has been supplanted in public memory and in scholarship by "the right-wing free-market advocacy more commonly associated with globalism's champions today" (p.4).Palen, an acknowledged expert on the history of nineteenth-century British and American imperialism and its interplay with economic globalization, introduces readers to a diverse coalition of activists, thinkers, and politicians who fused free trade, anti-imperialism, idealism, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and pacifism to spawn the eponymous idea of a Pax Economica as free trade's ultimate goal.In the opening chapter, Palen sets the scene by highlighting the global dominance of economic nationalism as a defining feature of the first era of globalization.Building on his earlier works on the imperialism of economic nationalism, 1 Palen maintains that, globally, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were -despite Britain's hegemony -not an era of free trade but mostly of imperialist protectionism.The author foregrounds American protectionists of the early nineteenth century, like Alexander Hamilton, Henry C. Carey, and Henry Clay as the intellectual fathers of the American School, which merged developmental protectionism, political and economic nationalism, and imperial ambitions to form a political and economic antidote to the overpowering economic might of Great Britain.Palen emphasizes the importance of Friedrich List as an intellectual exporter of the ideas of this American School and traces its impact and important protagonists across different empires and nation states and through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.As he demonstrates 1 Most notably: Marc-William Palen, The "Conspiracy" of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over
Author: Fritz Kusch
Institution: University of Bremen
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4411295147