Chapter 2 - Free trade and global order: the rise and fall of a Victorian vision

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 Britain entered on an unprecedented course for a Great Power. In adopting unilateral free trade, it opened its markets to all the nations of the world equally while seeking no reciprocal benefits. Rather than this heralding simply a new phase in Britain's shopkeepers' mentality, for many this offered the potential to reorder relations between states which industrialisation made possible. Trade – the douceur of commerce – would replace warfare between nations, for rather than representing a zero-sum contest between mercantilist states, the opening of a world market offered the possibility of universal peace. This ambition was voiced by the Conservative architect of repeal Sir Robert Peel, who, in writing to the citizens of Elbing in Germany, urged that ‘by encouraging freedom of intercourse between the nations of the world, we are promoting the separate welfare of each and are fulfilling the beneficent designs of an all-wise Creator’. ‘Commerce’ was, he continued, ‘the happy instrument of promoting civilisation, of abating national jealousies and prejudices, and of encouraging the maintenance of general peace by every consideration as well as every obligation of Christian duty.’ This language, however, was far from that of many of his own former supporters who distanced themselves from what they saw as a supremely misguided and potentially hazardous course, one which was, as Sir John Gladstone put it, ‘pregnant with results that may prove fatal in their consequences’.