Response to Richard Peet

Abstract

I wish to begin by thanking Dick for his generous comments on my attempt to unearth the local origins of the free trade doctrine, which Britain globalised in the name of Corn Law repeal, beginning in 1846. As he intimates, the issues he raises are ones that I have given considerable thought to. In these comments, I will pick up on the two issues he would emphasise differently (in his view, the greater significance of London-based British political economists, by comparison to Manchester-based cotton textile capitalists; and the ideological construction of knowledge, rather than the spatiality of knowledge production), but let me begin by noting some fundamental points of agreement. The logical foundation for free trade rooted in Ricardo and Torrens is indeed, in his words, 'wrong from the beginning'. A critique of the logical claims of this 200-year line of thinking, and its grounding in self-evidently false assumptions about the socio-spatial organisation of capitalism, is at the centre of my own analysis (cf. Sheppard 2005, 154-6). Almost two decades ago, with Trevor Barnes, I argued from a Marxian perspective that trade and uneven development are inextricably connected even in the absence of the powerasymmetries that enabled Britain (and more recently the US, and now China) to rig trade to the advantage of elites, and indirectly also at times workers, in these countries (Sheppard and Barnes 1990). We are also in agreement that national interest was key to the implementation of the free trade doctrine, that comparative advantage is a social construct (in this case, a consequence of the ability of mercantilist Britain to ruin India's sophisticated cotton textile and clothing industry, creating the conditions of possibility for the success of the Manchester cotton barons), and that Portugal was just the first of many places to suffer the opposite of what advocates claimed would be a rising tide of free trade that lifts all boats. Any challenge of the hegemonic and taken-for-granted status of the free trade doctrine must deconstruct