Graeme Thompson
In 1906, the British journalist and future Conservative politician Leo Amery penned The Fundamental Fallacies of Free Trade, an attack on more than half a century of British economic policy. While Liberals (and most Conservatives) fetishised free trade dogma, Amery argued, Britain’s rivals had embraced protectionism and were rapidly turning British global supremacy into a relic of the past. Tariffs seemed to offer an alternative – a way to revitalise domestic industry, reduce reliance on foreign imports, and knit the British Empire more tightly together, thereby arresting Britain’s relative geopolitical decline and positioning it to compete with ambitious new empires. After all, Amery pointed out, ‘through protectionism, other countries, America, Germany, Japan, are building up vast industries, and breeding great armies of citizens for the economic and political struggle of the future’.
Amery’s polemic was part of a broader assault on British economic and foreign policy orthodoxy at the turn of the 20th–century. The long-standing hegemony of laissez-faire liberalism, which prevailed under the influence of the Manchester School and became government policy under Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister William Gladstone, was coming to an end, challenged by arguments for economic interventionism. The rise of great power rivals, moreover, undermined Victorian verities about splendid isolation and the Concert of Europe. From the 1890s, with an increasingly powerful Germany on the Continent and imperial challengers proliferating – France in Africa and the Mediterranean, Russia threatening India and the Suez Canal from Central Asia and the Turkish Straits respectively, burgeoning US influence in the Americas, and a rising Japan in East Asia – Britain’s long-standing strategy of offshore balancing to focus on global trade and empire looked increasingly untenable. As Liberal Cabinet minister John Morley aptly put it after Gladstone’s death in 1898: ‘Many things went down into Mr Gladstone’s grave.’
The years before the First World War are commonly seen as a high point for the first great wave of liberal globalisation and the British imperial power, which made it possible. The corollary is that global economic integration hit a wall in 1914, and despite valiant efforts to reconstruct the international order in the 1920s, it succumbed to protectionism, autarky, and deglobalisation in the 1930s. There is, to be sure, much truth in that narrative. But history is rarely so straightforward. Long before the outbreak of the Great War, the world was already entering a post-liberal moment of protectionism and great power competition in which mercantilist tendencies and zero-sum geopolitics began to reshape and rewire the global order. Though Amery would have to wait until 1932 for Britain to abandon free trade, his critique reflected the shift from a British-led liberal order towards a more multipolar and mercantilist world. That history has renewed relevance amid the economic and geopolitical upheavals of our own times.
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