Marc-William Palen's "Pax Economica"

Marc-William Palen is a historian at the University of Exeter and the author of The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test provides an illustrative example of what the book is about by taking the reader into Chapter 3, which explores the intimate relationship between free trade, socialist internationalism, anti-imperialism, and peace. In this case, page 99 begins by briefly summarizing the thrust of Chapter 1 on how US-style economic nationalist policies of high tariffs and government subsidies came to monopolize the industrializing imperial world of the late 19th century. This protectionist and imperial backdrop is crucial for understanding how and why early-20th-century socialist theorists of imperialism built upon Marx and Engels’s mid-19th-century indictment of protectionism in order to make free trade a key component of an ideal socialist anti-imperial economic order. Thus, from around 1900,

While free trade kept its hold upon Britain, economic nationalism gripped the imperial world, as did the monopolistic rise of trusts and cartels and a new wave of Western colonialism in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. For turn-of-the-century socialist theorists of imperialism like Kōtoku Shūsui, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky, and Eduard Bernstein, these protectionist, monopolistic, and imperial trends were interrelated. They accordingly honed their theories of imperialism from within this evolving Marxist free-trade tradition, and updated it to account for the turbulent, protectionist, and militant world order. They at once critiqued protectionism for being a root cause of monopoly capitalism and imperialism – much like contemporary non-Marxist liberal radical theorists – while at the same time they inverted Marx and Engels’s stages of capitalist trade development.

Pax Economica uncovers how free trade was an essential left-wing ingredient for curing the world from wont and war since the mid-19th-century. In particular, it examines how free trade underpinned visions of peace, prosperity, democracy, and anti-imperialism from the left-wing perspectives of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians. The book also shows how their combined efforts ultimately helped create the more liberal economic order that arose after the Second World War, with timely lessons for today’s increasingly economic nationalist war-torn world.

Learn more about Pax Economica at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue