Abstract

Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In this counterhistory of an idea, Pax Economica 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. For some of its most radical left-wing adherents, free trade represented a hard-nosed critique of imperialism, militarism, and war. This 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 after World War II for such institutions as the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization, as well as the NIEO .