Pax Economica: Left‐Wing Visions of a Free Trade World.Marc‐WilliamPalen, (Princeton University Press, 2024. Pp. 309. ISBN 9780691199320. Hbk £30)

At a time when free trade is increasingly decried as a ploy to enrich capitalist elites in Western countries, Marc-William Palen makes a welcome counterpoint.For much of the late modern period, he shows convincingly, free trade was pushed by activists and thinkers on the left of the political spectrum.Radical liberals following in the footsteps of Richard Cobden promoted trade to deliver the famous 'cheap loaf' to the hungry workers of Britain and beyond.Feminists and left-wing Christians viewed commerce as a democratising and cooperation-enhancing tool.Even socialists saw free exchange as a way of breaking up the entrenched feudal aristocracies and mercantilist empires.Above all, what united these, at the time, disparate movements was their shared belief that free trade would not only deliver material gains but also promote global peace.It is this striving for an almost utopian pax economica that is at the heart of the book.What threatens this utopia, in Palen's narrative, is the similarly global reach of economic nationalism, a multi-headed hydra associated with imperialism, war, and unfree labour.When exploring the commercial peace movements, the reader is thrown straight into the action of the early 1840s, a time at which campaigns for the repeal of the Corn Laws were reaching their peak.While the book's antagonists, the economic nationalists, receive a (very commendable) treatment extending back to the late eighteenth century, the commercial peace movements are presented without much reference to possible antecedents.The 'doux commerce' thesis often attributed to enlightenment figures such as Montesquieu would surely qualify as an inspiration to eager Cobdenites.Or was he too French in a famously Francophobic Britain?Yet, earlier British Classical economists who had expounded the virtues of peace and trade, primarily of course Adam Smith, also receive short shrift.This may be because the book is ultimately less concerned with analysing the question of why particular ideas about trade arise and develop.Instead, it is best read as an attempt to provide a thick description of the vast cast of persons and organizations that have written about and campaigned for the interlocking causes of peace and free trade from a distinctly left-wing perspective.