Pax Economica
Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World
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- 29,99 €
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- 29,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
The forgotten history of the liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians who envisioned free trade as the necessary prerequisite for anti-imperialism and peace
Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion. Palen reveals how, for some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war.
Palen shows that the anti-imperial component of free trade was a phenomenon that came to encompass the political left wing within the British, American, Spanish, German, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Russian, French, and Japanese empires. The left-wing vision of a “pax economica” evolved to include supranational regulation to maintain a peaceful free-trading system—which paved the way for a more liberal economic order after World War II and such institutions as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Palen’s findings upend how we think about globalisation, free trade, anti-imperialism, and peace. Rediscovering the left-wing history of globalism offers timely lessons for our own era of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Free trade doctrine was once a mainstay of the political left, according to this probing history. University of Exeter historian Palen (The "Conspiracy" of Free Trade) explains that world trade in the 19th and early 20th centuries was defined by protectionist policies and imperial trade blocs that shielded domestic industries from foreign competition and secured captive markets for their products. Leftists challenged this orthodoxy, Palen contends, by arguing that free trade made economies more efficient, helped the poor by lowering prices, and impeded war by fostering international economic cooperation instead of ruinous rivalries. Exploring the development of these ideas among left-wing movements and leaders, Palen notes that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels supported free trade as a step on the path to a united global proletariat, feminist Jane Addams advocated for free trade to reduce food prices for malnourished women and children, and pacifists blamed imperial trade barriers for WWI. Though the prose is somewhat dry and scholarly, the scrupulous research unearths a surprising lineage of free trade leftists. ("Russian Marxists must stand for free trade... since free trade means accelerating the process that yields the means of deliverance from capitalism," proclaimed Vladimir Lenin in 1895.) The result is a revealing analysis of how potent, disruptive, and even revolutionary the concept of economic freedom has been. Photos.