Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:06:52.782Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

ADAM SMITH AS ADVOCATE OF EMPIRE, c. 1870–1932*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

MARC-WILLIAM PALEN
MARC-WILLIAM PALEN*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Exeter and US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
*
History Department, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines how The wealth of nations (1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions of The wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 179 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Anthony Howe, Duncan Bell, and the journal's anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions, to International Security Studies, Yale University, for its support, and to the 2013 British Scholar Conference attendees for their feedback.

References

1 Reprinted in Bennett, George, ed., The concept of empire: Burke to Attlee, 1774–1947 (London, 1962; orig. edn, 1953), pp. 165–6Google Scholar.

2 Howe, Anthony, ‘From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana: free trade, empire, and globalisation, 1846–1946’, Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies, 13 (2003), pp. 137–59Google Scholar.

3 University of Edinburgh Professor J. Shield Nicholson's Smithian imperial advocacy notably stands out in the historiography, as I will discuss in greater detail in Section iii. For the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ and the imperial federation movement, see especially Bell, Duncan, The idea of Greater Britain: empire and the future of world order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Duncan, ed., Victorian visions of global order: empire and international relations in nineteenth-century political thought (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar; Bell, Duncan, ‘From ancient to modern in Victorian imperial thought’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 735–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, E. H. H., ‘The political economy of empire, 1880–1914’, in Porter, Andrew, ed., Oxford history of the British empire: the nineteenth century (5 vols., New York, NY, 2001), iii, pp. 346–71Google Scholar; Gaston, Jack, ‘The free trade diplomacy debate and the Victorian European common market initiative’, Canadian Journal of History, 22 (1987), pp. 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tyler, J. E., The struggle for imperial unity, 1868–1895 (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Reese, Trevor R., The history of the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1868–1968 (London, 1968), pp. 64–79Google Scholar; Kendle, J. E., Federal Britain (London and New York, NY, 1997), ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kendle, J. E., The colonial and imperial conferences, 1887–1911 (London, 1967)Google Scholar; and Martin, Ged, ‘The idea of imperial federation’, in Hyam, Ronald and Martin, Ged, eds., Reappraisals in British imperial history (London, 1975), pp. 121–39Google Scholar. Martin also traces these ideas of imperial federalism back to the 1820s and briefly notes that ‘Empire federalists’ cited Smith ‘as a rival authority’, in ‘Empire federalism and imperial parliamentary union, 1820–1870’, Historical Journal, 16 (973), pp. 76, 80. Alternatively, Kendle begins his study in the 1600s in Federal Britain. For imperial federation, race, and the non-white British empire, see also Koditschek, Theodore, Liberalism, imperialism, and the historical imagination: nineteenth-century visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar. For a good summary of the federative schemes from the 1850s to 1930s, see Cheng, Seymour Ching-Yuan, Schemes for the federation of the British empire (New York, NY, 1931)Google Scholar.

4 For recent studies on imperial networks and the British world, see, inter al., Magee, Gary B. and Thompson, Andrew S., Empire and globalisation: networks of people, goods and capital in the British world, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, The British world: culture, diaspora and identity (London, 2003)Google Scholar; and Buckner, Philip and Francis, R. Douglas, eds., Rediscovering the British world (Calgary, 2005)Google Scholar.

5 Brown, Benjamin H., The Tariff Reform movement in Great Britain, 1881–1895 (New York, NY, 1943)Google Scholar; Palen, Marc-William, ‘Protection, federation and union: the global impact of the McKinley tariff upon the British empire, 1890–1894’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38 (2010), pp. 395–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trentmann, Frank, ‘The transformation of fiscal reform: reciprocity, modernization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early twentieth-century Britain’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 1005–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rogers, Edmund, ‘The United States and the fiscal debate in Britain, 1873–1913’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), pp. 593–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Marc-William Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade: Anglo-American relations and the ideological origins of American globalization, 1846–1896’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); Palen, Marc-William, ‘Foreign relations in the Gilded Age: a British free trade conspiracy?’, Diplomatic History, 37 (2013), pp. 217–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howe, Anthony, Free trade and liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), p. 267Google Scholar.

7 Green, E. H. H., ‘Rentiers versus producers? The political economy of the bimetallic controversy, c. 1880–1898’, English Historical Review, 103 (1988), pp. 588–612CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howe, A. C., ‘Bimetallism, c. 1880–1898: a controversy re-opened?’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990), pp. 377–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, , ‘The bimetallic controversy’, English Historical Review, 105 (1990), pp. 673–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 199–204, 233. For the American bimetallic reaction, see Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade’. Martin Daunton offers a persuasive argument for the continued success of the gold standard until the First World War in ‘Presidential address: Britain and globalisation since 1850: i. creating a global order, 1850–1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 16 (2006), pp. 1–38.

8 For studies of the connection between imperialism and technological advancements, see Lewis Pyenson, ‘Science and imperialism’, in Olby, Robert Cecil and Cantor, Geoffrey N., eds., Companion to the history of modern science (London and New York, NY, 1990)Google Scholar; Boyce, Robert W. D., ‘Imperial dreams and national realities: Britain, Canada, and the struggle for a Pacific telegraph cable, 1879–1902’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), pp. 39–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, The tools of empire (New York, NY, 1981)Google Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, The tentacles of progress: technology transfer in the age of imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, The invisible weapon: telecommunications and international politics, 1851–1945 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; and Drayton, Richard, ‘Science and the European empires’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23 (1995), pp. 503–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, ch. 3; Bell, Duncan, ‘Dissolving distance: technology, space, and empire in British political thought, 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), pp. 523–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. From around 1850–75, some Cobdenites also favoured greater imperial integration owing to these technological developments. See Howe, Anthony, ‘British liberalism and the legacy of St. Simon’, History of Economic Ideas, 17 (2009), pp. 107–20Google Scholar.

10 Knorr called Smith's theories on colonies ‘the most revolutionary advance in the evolution of British thought’ in his analysis of the subject. See Knorr, Klaus E., British colonial theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1963; orig. edn, 1944), pp. 175–95Google Scholar. Other good summaries of Adam Smith and imperialism can be found, among others, in Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003)Google Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A turn to empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation state in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar; Skinner, Andrew S., ‘Adam Smith and the American economic community an essay in applied economics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), pp. 59–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winch, Donald, Riches and poverty: an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Winch, Donald, Classical political economy and colonies (Cambridge, MA, 1965)Google Scholar; and Winch, Donald, Adam Smith's politics: an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 I should note that the analysis and examples included herein are by no means exhaustive, but illustrative of the turn-of-the-century usage of Adam Smith's advocacy of imperial federation.

12 Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, p. 66.

13 Winch, Smith's politics, p. 148.

14 Benians, E. A., ‘Adam Smith's project of an empire’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 1 (1925), p. 283CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For such imperial interest, see Reese, History of Royal Commonwealth Society, ch. 1; and Beasley, Edward, Empire as the triumph of theory: imperialism, information, and the Colonial Society of 1868 (London and New York, NY, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies of Smith's general legacy, see for instance Fleischacker, Samuel, ‘Adam Smith's reception among the American founders, 1776–1790’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59 (2002), pp. 897–924CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tribe, Keith, ‘The German reception of Adam Smith’, in Tribe, Keith, ed., A critical bibliography of Adam Smith (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Crowley, John E., ‘Neo-mercantilism and The wealth of nations: British commercial policy after the American revolution’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 339–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothschild, Emma, ‘Adam Smith and Conservative economics’, Economic History Review, n.s., 45 (1992), pp. 74–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Teichgraeber, Richard F., ‘“Less abused than I had reason to expect”: the reception of the Wealth of nations in Britain, 1776–1790’, Historical Journal, 30 (1991), pp. 337–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haakonssen, Knud and Winch, Donald, ‘The legacy of Adam Smith’, in Cambridge companion to Adam Smith, ed. Haakonssen, Knud (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Winch, Classical political economy and colonies.

15 Knorr, British colonial theories, pp. 187–94. Gerard M. Koot points to a more general crisis over Adam Smith's legacy during this period in English historical economics, 1870–1926: the rise of economic history and neomercantilism (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 10–14.

16 Wagner, Donald O., ‘British economists and the empire II’, Political Science Quarterly, 47 (1932), p. 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Howe, Free trade and liberal England; Howe, Anthony, ‘Free trade and the international order’, in Leventhal, Fred M. and Quinault, Roland, eds., Anglo-American attitudes: from revolution to partnership (Aldershot, 2000)Google Scholar.

18 For more on Cobden's foreign policy outlook see Cain, Peter, ‘Capitalism, war, and internationalism in the thought of Richard Cobden’, British Journal of International Studies, 5 (1979), pp. 229–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dawson, William Harbutt, Richard Cobden and foreign policy: a critical exposition, with special reference to our day and its problems (London, 1926)Google Scholar; Edsall, Nicholas C., Richard Cobden, independent radical (Cambridge, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobson, J. A., Richard Cobden: the international man (New York, NY, 1918)Google Scholar; Howe, Free trade and liberal England; Howe, Anthony, ‘Richard Cobden and the Crimean War’, History Today, 54 (2004), pp. 46–51Google Scholar; Howe, Anthony and Morgan, Simon, Rethinking nineteenth-century liberalism: Richard Cobden bicentenary essays (Aldershot, 2006)Google Scholar; Knorr, British colonial theories, pp. 166–74; Semmel, Bernard, Rise of free trade imperialism: classical political economy and the empire of free trade and imperialism, 1750–1850 (London and New York, NY, 1970), pp. 158–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MacDonagh, Oliver, ‘The anti-imperialism of free trade’, Economic History Review, 14 (1962), pp. 489–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicholls, David, ‘Richard Cobden and the international peace congress movement, 1848–1853’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 351–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spall, Richard Francis, ‘Free trade, foreign relations, and the anti-corn-law league’, International History Review, 10 (1988), pp. 405–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Miles, ‘Imperium et libertas? Rethinking the radical critique of imperialism during the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19 (1991), pp. 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 116–41; Anthony Howe, ‘Cobden club (act. 1866–1982)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford, 2005); Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade’; Palen, ‘Foreign relations in the Gilded Age’.

20 Trentmann, Frank, Free trade nation: commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain (Oxford and New York, NY, 2008), p. 2Google Scholar; Trentmann, Frank, ‘Political culture and political economy: interest, ideology and free trade’, Review of International Political Economy, 5 (1998), pp. 217–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a provocative interpretation of imperialism and British socialism during the period covered here, see Claeys, Gregory, Imperial sceptics: British critics of empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Matthew, H. C. G., The liberal imperialists: the ideas and politics of a post-Gladstonian elite (London, 1973)Google Scholar; McKibbin, Ross, The evolution of the Labour party, 1910–1924 (New York, NY, 1974)Google Scholar; and Morris, A. J. A., Edwardian radicalism, 1900–1914: some aspects of British radicalism (Boston, MA, 1974)Google Scholar.

21 As Anthony Howe describes, ‘only slowly was the discontent of agrarians, manufacturers, and imperial federationists fused, under the aegis of Britain's historical economists, into the Tariff Reform assault on the body of Cobdenism pronounced dead a decade earlier’ in the 1890s. Howe, Free trade and liberal England, p. 195.

22 Smith, Adam, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (Edinburgh, 1843; orig. edn, 1776), pp. 251, 254Google Scholar.

23 Smith, Wealth of nations, p. 259.

24 Goldwin Smith was the most outspoken Cobdenite advocate of British decolonization, and was prone to referencing Adam Smith to support his argument. Duncan Bell notes that Goldwin Smith was himself ‘highly selective’ in employing ‘Smithian arguments against the economic viability of the colonial system’. Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, p. 198. For such usage, see for instance Goldwin Smith, The empire (Oxford and London, 1863), pp. xvi–xvii, 21–3, 113.

25 Smith, Wealth of nations, pp. 255, 258.

26 Ibid., p. 258; Guttridge, G. H., ‘Adam Smith on the American Revolution: an unpublished memorial’, American Historical Review, 38 (1933), pp. 714–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Andrew S., ‘Adam Smith and the American Revolution’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 7 (1977), pp. 75–87Google Scholar.

27 Smith, Wealth of nations, p. 258.

28 For such early references to Adam Smith's scheme of imperial unity, see for instance Australia's Jenkins, John Edward, The colonies and imperial unity, or, the ‘barrel without the hoops’ (London, 1871), p. 28Google Scholar; and Smith, Francis Gould, The Australian protectionist (Melbourne, 1877), p. 7Google Scholar. Jenkins in fact advocated a free trade empire in the hope of stemming the movement toward protectionism among the self-governing colonies of Canada and Victoria. For this early demand for a free trade empire, see also Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 213–22.

29 Brown, Tariff Reform movement; Kendle, John E., The round table movement and imperial union (Toronto and Buffalo, 1975)Google Scholar; Palen, ‘Protection, federation and union’; Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade’, ch. 8.

30 Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 215–16; Trainor, Luke, ‘The British government and imperial economic unity, 1890–1895’, Historical Journal, 13 (1970), pp. 68–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Cain, P. J. and Hopkins, A. G., British imperialism, 1688–2000 (London, 2002), p. 185Google Scholar. The City did not, however, offer the same support to the Tariff Reform League. See also Marrison, Andrew, British business and protection 1903–1932 (Oxford, 1996)Google Scholar; and Howe, Anthony, ‘Liberals and the City, c. 1900–1931’, in Michie, Ranald and Williamson, Philip, eds., The British government and the city of London in the twentieth century (Cambridge, 2004)Google Scholar.

32 Dilke, Charles, Greater Britain: a record of travel in English-speaking countries (New York, NY, 1869), pp. 206–7Google Scholar. For more on Dilke, see Gwynn, Stephen M. and Tuckwell, Gertrude, Sir Charles W. Dilke (2 vols., London, 1917)Google Scholar; and Nicholls, David, The lost prime minister: a life of Sir Charles Dilke (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

33 See also Dunn, Waldo Hilary, James Anthony Froude: a biography (2 vols., Oxford, 1961–3)Google Scholar; Thompson, Walter, James Anthony Froude on nation and empire: a study in Victorian racialism (London, 1998)Google Scholar; Markus, Julia, J. Anthony Froude: the last undiscovered great Victorian (New York, NY, 2005)Google Scholar; Bell, Duncan, ‘Republican imperialism: J. A. Froude and the virtue of empire’, History of Political Thought, 30 (2009), pp. 166–91Google Scholar; and Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, ch. 5.

34 May, Ernest R., American imperialism: a speculative essay (Chicago, IL, 1991: orig. edn, 1967), pp. 129–30, 155, 171, 184, 205Google Scholar. For more on Seeley, see especially Bell, Duncan, ‘Unity and difference: John Robert Seeley and the political theology of international relations’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), pp. 559–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wormell, Deborah, Sir John Seeley and the uses of history (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar; Jones, H. S., Victorian political thought (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 55–9Google Scholar; and Deudney, Daniel, ‘Greater Britain or greater synthesis? Seeley, Mackinder, and Wells on Britain in the global industrial era’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), pp. 187–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Rawson W. Rawson, at the inaugural presidential address of the Statistical Society of London in 1884, argued that Britain's greatness came primarily from its colonial possessions, tied together through Anglo-Saxon kinship. He also called for a ‘fixed and unwavering policy … that England and her Colonies are “one and indivisible”’. Rawson, Rawson W., ‘British and foreign colonies’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 47 (1884), p. 583CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Greswell, William, ‘Imperial federation’, in The five best essays on imperial federation submitted to the London Chamber of Commerce for their prize competition, and recommended for publication by the judges: J. Anthony Froude, Professor J. R. Seeley, M. A., and Sir Rawson W. Rawson (London, 1887), p. 2Google Scholar; Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on representative government (London, 1861), p. 324Google Scholar.

37 Greswell, ‘Imperial federation’, pp. 3–5.

38 Ibid., pp. 9, 11–12.

39 C. V. Smith, ‘Imperial federation: suggestions as to the mode in which it can be carried into effect’, in Five best essays, pp. 128, 129, 140, 158.

40 Young, Frederick, On the political relations of mother countries and colonies (London, 1883), p. 16Google Scholar.

41 Parkin, George Robert, Imperial federation: the problem of national unity (London, 1892), p. 304Google Scholar.

42 Hadley, Arthur T., ed., Adam Smith's essay on colonies (New York, NY, and London, 1901), p. viGoogle Scholar.

43 Bowen, George Ferguson, ‘The federation of the British empire’, Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, 17 (1885–6), p. 295Google Scholar; Bousfield, William, The government of the empire: a consideration of means for the representation of the British colonies in an imperial parliament (London, 1877), p. 19Google Scholar; Barker, J. Ellis, Great and Greater Britain: the problems of motherland and empire, political naval, military, industrial, financial, social (New York, NY, 1910), p. 75Google Scholar; Cheng, Schemes for federation, pp. 198, 217.

44 Rae, John, Life of Adam Smith (London, 1895), pp. 281–2Google Scholar; Knorr, British colonial theories, pp. 187–8.

45 Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 214–15, 218. See for example Davidson, John, Commercial federation and colonial trade policy (London, 1900), pp. 14, 75Google Scholar. New Zealand and South Africa thereafter instituted imperial preferential policies in 1903, followed by Australia in 1908.

46 Cunningham, William, The rise and decline of the free trade movement (London, 1904), preface, pp. 151–2, 158Google Scholar; Cunningham, William, Richard Cobden and Adam Smith (London, 1904), pp. 3, 17Google Scholar. For more on Cunningham, see also Koot, English historical economics, ch. 7.

47 Jefferis, James, The federation of the British people: a lecture delivered April 15th, at the opening of the forty-second yearly session of the North Adelaide Young Men's Society (Adelaide, 1901), pp. 4, 14Google Scholar.

48 Ibid., p. 16.

49 Miller, E. Morris, Some phases of preference in imperial policy (Melbourne, 1911), pp. 4, 12, 11Google Scholar. Andrew Wyatt-Walter has made a similar argument in ‘Adam Smith and the liberal tradition in international relations’, Review of International Studies, 22 (J1996), pp. 5–28.

50 Miller, Some phases, pp. 5, 2, 4. This Cobdenite logic was of course quite in keeping with Smith's proposal for imperial decolonization.

51 Ibid., pp. 28–9, 22–3. For Deakin's support of Chamberlain, see also La Nauze, J. A., Alfred Deakin: a biography (Melbourne, 1979), pp. 475–514Google Scholar; Howe, Free trade and liberal England, p. 241. Similarly, B. R. Wise, once a strong Australian advocate of free trade, became the spokesman of the Australian Preferential League, a Chamberlain supporter, and even suggested that Cobden was no ‘Little Englander’, but if alive would have supported Chamberlain's reforms. See B. R. Wise, ‘Preferential trade’, 21 Nov. 1903, Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, B. R. Wise papers, 1879–1915, ML MSS 6107, vol. 6, box 2, fo. 12; B. R. Wise, ‘Cobden's imperial policy’, London Times, 28 Dec. 1905; Pall Mall Gazette, 23 Oct. 1905, p. 3; and Howe, Free trade and liberal England, p. 241.

52 Chamberlain, quoted in the London Times, 1 Aug. 1889, p. 6; Quinalt, Roland, ‘John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 623–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 222, 230.

54 Although, fortunately for the latter, the British economy underwent a rapid recovery in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, severely impeding Chamberlain's protectionist movement. Correspondingly, various Liberal Unionists (inter al., the duke of Devonshire and Goschen) became Unionist free traders after 1903.

55 For the British empire's long Tariff Reform movement, see Brown, Tariff Reform movement; Zebel, Sydney H., ‘Joseph Chamberlain and the genesis of Tariff Reform’, Journal of British Studies, 7 (1967), pp. 131–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, D., ‘Joseph Chamberlain and the origins of the Tariff Reform movement’, Moirae, 3 (1978), pp. 1–7Google Scholar; Green, E. H. H., ‘Radical conservatism: the electoral genesis of Tariff Reform’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 667–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, E. H. H., The crisis of Conservatism: the politics, economics and ideology of the British Conservative party, 1880–1914 (London and New York, NY, 1995)Google Scholar; Howe, Free trade and liberal England; Palen, ‘Protection, federation and union’; Palen, ‘Conspiracy of free trade’, ch. 8; Matthew, The liberal imperialists, esp. pp. 100–1, 166–7; Trentmann, ‘Transformation of fiscal reform’; Rogers, ‘United States and the fiscal debate’; Coats, A. W., ‘Political economy and the Tariff Reform campaign of 1903’, Journal of Law and Economics, 11 (1968), pp. 181–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Semmel, Bernard, Imperialism and social reform: English social imperial thought, 1895–1914 (London, 1960), p. 124Google Scholar; Fraser, Peter, ‘Unionism and Tariff Reform: the crisis of 1906’, Historical Journal, 5 (1962), pp. 149–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cain, P. J., ‘Political economy in Edwardian England: the Tariff Reform controversy’, in O'Day, A., ed., The Edwardian age: conflict and stability, 1900–1914 (London, 1979)Google Scholar; Rempel, Richard A., Unionists divided: Arthur Balfour, Joseph Chamberlain and the unionist free traders (Hamden, CT, 1972)Google Scholar; Amery, Julian, Joseph Chamberlain and the Tariff Reform campaign (The life of Joseph Chamberlain, vols. v and vi (New York, NY, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sykes, Alan, Tariff Reform in British politics, 1903–1913 (New York, NY, 1980)Google Scholar; Sykes, Alan, ‘The confederacy and the purge of the unionist free traders, 1906–1910’, Historical Journal, 18 (1975), pp. 349–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fraser, Peter, Joseph Chamberlain: radicalism and empire, 1868–1914 (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Thompson, Andrew S., ‘Tariff Reform: an imperial strategy, 1903–1913’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 1033–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brooks, David, The age of upheaval: Edwardian politics, 1899–1914 (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar; Marrison, British business and protection; and Rixford Kinney Snyder, The tariff problem in Great Britain, 1918–1923 (Stanford, CA, 1944).

56 Garvin, James Louis, ‘The economics of empire’, National Review, 42 (1903), p. 5Google Scholar.

57 James Louis Garvin, ‘The maintenance of empire: a study in the economics of power’, in Charles Sydney Goldman, ed., The empire and the century: a series of essays on imperial problems and possibilities by various writers (London, 1905), pp. 83–5. For more on Garvin and ‘constructive imperialism’, see Cain, P. J., ‘The economic philosophy of constructive imperialism’, in Navari, Cornelia, ed., British politics and the spirit of the age: political concepts in action (Keele, 1996)Google Scholar.

58 Brisbane Courier, 14 Jan. 1905, p. 4.

59 Garvin, ‘Economics of empire’, p. 5; Amery, Leopold, The fundamental fallacies of free trade (London, 1908), p. 197Google Scholar; Duke of Westminster, ‘Practical imperialism’, Nineteenth Century, 72 (1912), pp. 876–7Google Scholar. Charles E. T. Stuart-Linton laid out his scheme for imperial federation during this period, also invoking Adam Smith as inspiration. Stuart-Linton noted as well that the difficulties of his day that ‘seemed to stand in the way of these ideas’ had been removed owing to the development of ‘modern inventions’. Stuart-Linton, Charles E. T., The problem of empire governance (London, 1912), pp. 15, 154Google Scholar.

60 Nicholson, J. Shield, ‘Tariffs and international commerce’, in White, A. S., ed., Britannic confederation (London, 1892), p. 122Google Scholar.

61 London Times, 15 Aug. 1903, p. 4, 31 Oct. 1903, p. 9; Coats, ‘Political economy and the Tariff Reform campaign of 1903’, p. 214; Wood, John Cunningham, British economists and the empire (London and Canberra, 1983), pp. 153–61Google Scholar.

62 J. Shield Nicholson, introduction to Friedrich List, The national system of political economy, trans. Sampson S. Lloyd (London, 1904; orig. edn, 1885), pp. xxvi–xxvii. Koot even places Nicholson, albeit with caveats, in the English ‘historical economist’ camp and briefly touches upon his imperial project. Koot, English historical economics, pp. 155–9.

63 Nicholson, J. Shield, A project of empire: a critical study of the economics of imperialism, with special reference to the ideas of Adam Smith (London, 1909), pp. x–xiGoogle Scholar. For criticism of Nicholson's nationalist-imperialist interpretation, see especially Knorr, British colonial theories, pp. 187–94.

64 F. S. Oliver, ‘Mr. Shield Nicholson's “project of empire”’, London Times, 5 Jan. 1910, p. 5.

65 Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 280–1; Wood, British economists, p. 116.

66 Trentmann, Free trade nation; Trentmann, ‘The strange death of free trade: the erosion of the “liberal consensus” in Britain, c. 1903–1932’, in Eugenio F. Biagini, ed., Citizenship and community: liberals, radicals, and collective identities in the British isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 219–50; Howe, Free trade and liberal England, ch. 8; Young, Ralph A., ‘British imperial preference and the American tariff’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 141 (1929), pp. 204–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 Knorr, British colonial theories, p. 187. In 1928, for example, C. R. Fay, professor of economic history at the University of Toronto, now portrayed Adam Smith as a ‘liberal imperialist’. Fay, C. R., Great Britain from Adam Smith to the present day (London, 1928), p. 3Google Scholar.