Pax Economica: Left‐Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. By Marc‐WilliamPalen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. 328 pp. $24.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐0691277882

From the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846 to duty-free shops in airports today, peace activists have used many ways to create a better world through free trade. Between the mid-19th through the mid-20th century, a loose coalition of liberals, feminists, pacifists, and socialists (what Marc-William Palen describes as the “commercial peace movement”) argued that a system of universal free trade would be the foundation of a more peaceful, just, and equitable world, free of imperialism, militarism, and war. In this well-written and impressively researched book, Palen explores the forgotten history of this story, highlighting the interconnections among these left-wing radicals, while also highlighting the differences in their specific approaches to peace. He also explains how the Cold War contributed to a resurgence of neocolonialism, neomercantilism, and economic nationalism that co-opted the language of free trade so that today many people associate “free trade” with the more right-wing “free enterprise” in which wealthier and more powerful countries dominate the trade of poorer and weaker nations. To make these arguments, Palen relies on an international array of government documents, newspapers, corporate papers, personal papers and letters, as well as many secondary sources. The author is well-qualified to explore this topic. An associate professor in the Department of Archaeology and History at the University of Exeter, his research focuses on the history of trade, economic ideology, and foreign policy. His particular interest is the ways gender, humanitarianism, and ideology have shaped global imperial expansion. His highly-acclaimed first book, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalization, 1846–1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examined the empires of the United Kingdom and the United States within the history of globalization. Pax Economica is his second book. Palen uses a thematic approach to highlight the multifaceted growth and evolution of the free trade tradition within anti-imperialist and peace networks in Europe, the US, and Asia. The first chapter describes the 19th century world in which protectionism, nationalism, militarism, and colonialism were inextricably entwined. From the mid-19th century until World War II, economic nationalism became the main political force supporting imperial expansion and consolidation, based on what became known as the “American System.” Created by Alexander Hamilton, its features included a central banking system, protective tariffs for American industries and farmers, and improved transportation systems. By the 1890s, the American System was popular in France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Japan, largely because of those countries' fears of competing with industrialized Britain. Under this system, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Western powers created trade agreements with countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that prevented the latter from signing agreements which gave some Western nations a favored status over others. American Republicans referred to this policy (in China, for example) as the “Open Door Policy.” But Palen labels this “Orwellian double speak” and he points out that historians, unfortunately, continued to use this term, leading people to assume that “open door” was “free trade.” In practice, “open door” meant “equal access to foreign-controlled China markets, not free trade. The door into the US domestic market would remain tightly closed” (27). In response to that system, in the mid-19th century there developed a “radical, cosmopolitan, pacifistic alliance of capitalists, socialists, feminists, and Christians” who believed free trade would bring about “a more peaceful, anti-imperialist world order” (50). Each of the next four chapters discusses a different proponent of free trade within the peace community: liberal radicals, socialists, feminists, and Christian pacifists. The liberal radicals had their origins in the ideas of the British Radical and Liberal politician Richard Cobden (1804–1865). Also known as the “Manchester School,” this group argued that free trade would bring prosperity, industrialization, and the end of empires. It would end hunger by providing a global food supply and low prices, and it would promote democracy by weakening mercantilist elites. These ideas spread across the Atlantic when American diplomat and social activist Elihu Burritt created the League of Universal Brotherhood, based on Cobdenism. These ideas also gained followers elsewhere. The rapid expansion of European imperialism and militarism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries led to a parallel resurgence of the commercial peace movement, not only in Europe and North America, but also in the Philippines and China. A new generation of liberals began to call for a supranational governmental structure that would enforce a system of global free trade. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points gave hope to these activists, though they would be disappointed by the outcome of the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The disruptions of the Great Depression and World War II helped give legitimacy to the liberal radical vision of Pax Economica and by the late 1940s, it appeared to be within reach. Socialists also supported, to greater or lesser degrees, the free trade movement. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels gave qualified endorsement to Cobden's ideas. They saw free trade as helping to bring about a socialist revolution, but feared that the resulting lower prices would lead to lower wages. Friedrich List, while also supporting some free trade, argued that the industries of developing nations needed protectionism, at least initially, to catch up to more industrialized countries. But as the protectionist American System became more popular in the later 19th century, socialist thinkers such as Kōtoku Shūsui (Japan), Rudolf Hilferding (Austria), Vladimir Lenin (Russia), and Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein (both of Germany) all began to see free trade as a way to bring about a more equitable economic world order. US imperialism in Latin America also led to the popularity of free trade ideas in Argentina. In 1916 the Socialist Peace Conference, with representatives from Spain, the US, Denmark, Sweden, Argentina, and the Netherlands, adopted a resolution against economic war and in favor of free trade. And Woodrow Wilson's endorsement of Manchester School ideas in his Fourteen Points (freedom of the seas, free trade, and a supranational organization to enforce them) spurred socialist activism in 1917–1918. Feminists and free traders first came together in the mid-19th century transatlantic antislavery movement. They saw free trade and universal emancipation as necessary to end world hunger, militarism, imperialism, and aristocracy. The British feminist theorist Harriet Martineau saw protectionism as a kind of economic slavery because it created unfree markets for world consumers and supported the aristocratic landed elites. American social reformer Florence Kelley, founder of the National Consumers League, saw free trade as a way to protect consumers from unfair prices. Other feminists who supported free trade included Americans Jane Addams, Fanny Garrison Villard, and Ellen Winsor, as well as Luise Zietz (Germany), Bertha von Suttner (Austria), and Annie, Helena, and Jane Cobden (UK). During and after World War I, the Woman's Peace Party, Women's Peace Society, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and the American Anti-Imperialist League all supported free trade as a way to world peace. As with the socialists, there was some division in the feminist camp. For example, Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton supported free trade but also saw imperialism as “benign” due to its “civilizing” effects, while others, such as Jane Addams, strongly opposed imperialism. In the interwar period, feminist peace activists developed a strong critique of colonial economic policies. Economist Emily Greene Balch developed a truly cosmopolitan vision of a world without borders and racial hatred. Other feminists in the US, Denmark, Canada, the UK, Russia, and Australia were attracted to Henry George's idea of a single tax on land value to break up land monopolies and weaken aristocracies. In contrast to some of their male counterparts, feminist peace activists saw free trade through the lens of ending childhood hunger and empowering women. Christian pacifists supported free trade as a way to create the equitable economic order that God intended. In the 1830s and 1840s, liberal radicals explicitly joined the free trade and Christian peace movements, while Rev. Joshua Leavitt added antislavery to the mix. The Quaker Free Produce Movement promoted the idea of boycotting slave-produced goods. And Henry George wrote to Pope Leo XIII to call for a single land tax. Following World War I, the growth of authoritarianism, colonialism, and protectionism strengthened the Christian pacifists' resolve that economic interdependence and international fraternity were essential for world peace. During this time, Unitarians, Quakers, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians all were active in promoting free trade. Organizations like the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) also promoted free trade as a way to a peaceful world. While the Christian pacifist free trade movement was centered in the US and UK, it found proponents in other parts of the world, such as Japan. Supporters of free trade and supranational governance found a friend in Cordell Hull. When he served as US Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944, they were encouraged to believe that a peaceful economic world order was close at hand. Because of the obvious failures of the imperialist old order, in the late 1940s the world seemed primed for “peace through interdependence” (190). New supranational bodies were created to regulate the economy, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). But the Cold War reversed all this as governments turned away from multilateralism, and the “Pax Americana” came to be identified with military might, not economic cooperation. Colonial powers were reluctant to give up control of other lands, and colonized peoples turned to violence to achieve independence. Beginning in the 1970s with the growth of neoliberalism, conservative elites increasingly supported anti-democratic free trade ideas and policies, co-opting the language of the left for its own purposes. In response, left-wing reformers adapted their policies, shifting to an “alter-globalization” approach which would reconcile their desire for economic interdependence with the decolonizing world's demands for economic sovereignty. In practice, this meant embracing the ethical economic ideals of the international co-operative movement and the growing Fair Trade movement. Although this book was published before Donald Trump began his second term as US president, Palen's conclusions are even more relevant now than in 2024. Trump's “America First” foreign policy, trade wars with long-established trade partners, and US withdrawal from numerous international agreements and organizations bear “all the neomercantilist hallmarks that the commercial peace movement had fought against for the past 150 years” (222). Historians have largely overlooked the role of free trade ideology in shaping pacifist thought and practice, so this volume offers an important addition to Peace Studies and Economics. The thematic approach does lead to some repetition within the book, but this approach also emphasizes the numerous and sometimes surprising interconnections among the progressive reform and peace movements. Pax Economica is very well written and well organized, making the broad arguments generally clear, even for non-specialists. That said, the book does get into detailed economic analyses that sometimes make for heavy sledding for those who are not economists. For that reason, this book would be appropriate for specialists in the field, as well as for students at the graduate and perhaps advanced undergraduate levels. It would also be helpful for professors seeking background for classroom lectures. In sum, this is an impressive addition to both Peace and Economic History, and it is no surprise that, among other accolades from the Financial Times, New Yorker, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, it received the Peace History Society's Elise M. Boulding Prize in November 2025. The author declares no conflicts of interest.