Trade and Empire

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The conclusion argues that two factors explains why the age of popular politics came to an end, and why one major factor for this was a steep drop-off in youthful voter turnout. First, wealthier Americans sought to “wrest control of democracy from working-class politicos … creating new youth organizations that stressed rational, informed, sober political judgment” (131). This had the unexpected consequence of cleaving political life from social life and making the former much less exciting for young people. Second, by the late nineteenth century, a youth culture emerged that emphasized what young people had in common with one another, not with striving to advance toward adulthood, but rather with celebrating youth. As he puts it, “To many young Americans after 1890, politics belonged with politics, and youth belonged with youth” (132). While Grinspan is not the first to note these two underlying trends, the import of The Virgin Vote is to bring them to bear on one another, providing new insight into the history of politics and that of youth. It is engagingly written, peopled with varied archival voices, and would work well in classrooms at the undergraduate or graduate level.

TRADE AND EMPIRE PALEN, MARC-WILLIAM. The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 334 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-10912-4. REVIEWED BY APRIL MERLEAUX, Florida International University doi:10.1017/S1537781416000736 Marc-William Palen’s The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade is, at its core, an intellectual history of nineteenth-century Anglo American economic thought, focusing specifically on the controversy between free trade and tariff protection. These debates were, Palen demonstrates, interwoven with broader questions about party politics, slavery, and empire. I am delighted by Palen’s serious and meticulous excavation of tariff politics, and not just because I am one of the select few who are fascinated by this history. As a work that seeks to bridge the fields of international relations, intellectual history, and empire studies, Palen contributes a sophisticated interpretation of the imperial underpinnings of tariff protectionists’ economic nationalism. The book follows the debate over trade policy from the 1840s through the Civil War, and finally through realignments within the Republican Party between the 1870s and the 1890s that culminated in the age of U.S. empire after 1898. This is an expansive and impressive achievement. For scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era with interests in the political economy of empire, Palen’s observations ought to be the new starting place. He takes aim specifically at what he calls “revisionist open door imperial scholarship” (253), especially William Appleman Williams, Walter Lafeber, and their scholarly heirs. Late nineteenth-century U.S. empire building was not an exercise in free trade or open-door expansionism, as many have uncritically assumed. Free traders generally opposed interventionist foreign policy, and saw international trade as a route to peaceful coexistence. By contrast, economic nationalists promoted tariffs and bilateral reciprocity treaties as a means of extending U.S. political and economic power abroad, and these same people advocated the acquisition of overseas territories. This may seem counterintuitive—trade protection at first glance might seem to be isolationist. But trade protectionism was always meant to control the trajectory of economic and political expansion, not to stop it. By the turn of the century, Republicans who advocated both empire and tariffs controlled the White House.

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Palen calls proponents of trade protection Listian nationalists, referring to the German theorist Friedrich List, who formulated their core ideas in the 1820s. Indeed, the proponents of U.S. overseas empire drew on a long intellectual history of protectionist thought, and they engaged in decades of contentious wrangling with adherents to the English free-trade ideology known as Cobdenism. Palen notes that the dominant nineteenth-century free trade ideology in North America did not originate in the agrarian South (58). Instead, Cobdenite ideas crossed the Atlantic as part of a broader constellation of reform ideas aligned with antislavery and free labor in the 1840s. Nonetheless, during the Civil War, British commitment to free trade led them to favor the free-trade Confederacy since Southern diplomats portrayed secession as a response to Northern tariff aggression. Britain only began to incline toward the protectionist North when the North began to more explicitly articulate abolition as a war aim. During the 1870s, Cobdenite free trade gained new adherents, though Listian nationalists increasingly attributed its popularity to a British conspiracy to control the United States. Free traders were never fully able to shake off the implication that their approach weakened the United States, and Anglophobia tended to dominate political discourse. After the collapse of Reconstruction and the financial panic in the 1870s, trade policy was a crucial axis for Republican realignment. By the 1880s, the Republican Party had turned away from its earlier commitments to antislavery and civil rights, instead focusing on political economy (86). During this period, a “progressive protectionist vision for regional economic integration” began to emerge (104). The drive to “protect the home market and open foreign markets” (105) culminated in the ascendancy of William McKinley at the end of the century. Palen’s careful attention to trade reciprocity is particularly welcome because he shows how fully it was a protectionist and imperial practice. Reciprocity is poorly understood, even now. It is not free trade, but international trade constrained by particular kinds of rules, generally shaped by and for the benefit of the more powerful trading partner. Nineteenth-century trade reciprocity was based on “discrimination and retaliation” that could be used strategically “to prize open new markets in Latin America and the Pacific” with threats of tariff retaliation (xxiv). Reciprocity was an integral part of the Listian nationalist agenda, and it is no wonder that tariffs and reciprocal trade treaties grew to such prominence under McKinley’s imperial presidency. One of Palen’s most important insights is that the U.S. overseas empire that took shape after 1898 was an empire of trade protection, not an open-door empire. Readers should pay particular heed to the important argument that the 1890 McKinley tariff—a very high tariff coupled with bilateral reciprocity and increased executive control over trade—catalyzed a shift in the British colonial trade policy. Reacting to the restrictive tariff, Britain’s white colonies increasingly demanded trade concessions from the home country, setting up a major shift toward British protectionism in the form of colonial preferential trade. This system lasted at least until the end of the Second World War. Despite the book’s important arguments, it has some issues. My biggest quibble is with the phrase “anti-imperialism of free trade.” Palen argues that free trade advocates, including President Grover Cleveland, acted out of a concerted theory of international peace through free trade that sought to avoid overt, imperial interventions abroad. Palen draws a stark contrast between isolationist economic nationalism and cosmopolitan trade expansionism in this regard. But both ideologies aimed at promoting international economic exchange, and neither ultimately shied away from the racial hierarchies of imperial power. Indeed, many political leaders opposed territorial acquisition and settler colonialism but nonetheless believed that the United States should exercise paternalistic control over the less-civilized parts of the world. Some sections of Palen’s analysis would have been stronger with case studies focused on a single commodity. While it is true that debate over tariff policy was shaped by general theories about how protection and free trade worked, in practice policymakers debated tariffs one commodity at a time. The debates varied greatly among the thousands of items in any given tariff schedule, and often flummoxed the theoretical integrity of both positions. Producer and consumer groups lobbied for their own interests, strategically and sometimes cynically using economic theories to Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Exeter, on 03 Apr 2017 at 18:32:34, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781416000736

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suit their arguments, but also drawing on the particular geographies and cultural understandings of the commodities under consideration. Palen situates his study of intellectual luminaries and political thinkers within the literatures on high politics; U.S., British, Australian, and Canadian histories. His command of the literature is expansive, and he uses it to make a persuasive case for global—or at least inter-imperial—histories of economic thought. By comparison, Palen shows less fluency with the more recent studies of U.S. empire, particularly those that use cultural historical methods and take race and gender as key categories of analysis. There is surely much work remaining as we integrate the study of the cultures of empire with political economy, but Palen may be too quick to dismiss the insights from the new imperial history (xxxi). He occasionally mentions African Americans’ and women’s responses to the tariff, but the analysis is thin and occasionally veers toward the trivializing. Likewise, there is scarce mention of the significant overlaps between debates over immigration policy and tariff policy. These overlaps reveal policymakers’ and theorists’ racial logic most explicitly, and would have been a logical extension of Palen’s early focus on the connection between free labor and free trade. The monograph is ultimately written by and for specialists. The evidence at times overwhelms the argument and the prose is dense, making it a challenge for undergraduates and nonspecialists. But Palen offers fresh insights into a range of issues related to nineteenth-century political, economic, and intellectual history, and serious scholars of these topics should pay heed. This book sets a new bar for how we interpret the trade politics of empire, and I certainly hope it finds wide influence.

COTTON CAPITALISM BAKER, BRUCE E. and BARBARA HAHN. The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-ofthe-Century New York and New Orleans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xi + 214 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-021165-3. REVIEWED BY CARIN PELLER-SEMMENS, University of Sussex doi:10.1017/S153778141600075X It would be a disservice to The Cotton Kings to label it as just an economic history or as the newest volume to join the growing literature on capitalism and the global economy in the long nineteenth century. While it certainly is an economic history, it is also a work of social history, labor history, urban history, cultural history, and Southern history. The authors’ interdisciplinary approach draws upon the rich sub-focuses within nineteenth and twentieth century history and results in a book that enriches our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between commodities and the marketplace. The clear and nontechnical explanations of financial terminology and processes augment this well-researched book, and the integration of the financial language propels the story, ensuring that it will be featured on many reading lists and be useful to numerous scholars. The Cotton Kings is an economic drama that unfolds in cotton exchanges, cotton fields, brokerage houses, courthouses, and Congress. It showcases the rural, urban, and global context and impact of cotton as both commodity and currency. This book argues that market regulation works, that the system that replaced the antebellum market was shaped by wartime practices, and that it was directly incorporated within and reactive to technological advancements and global business climate. Spanning from the 1870s until World War I—while frequently teasing out connections between earlier legislation and more contemporary bills, such as the 1922 Grain Futures Act and Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 that paved the way for the Commodity

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