Imperialism Of Free Trade Research Articles

The Coloniser Colonised: Legacies of Britain’s Informal Empire in Spain

ABSTRACT For over a century from the 1830s to the 1940s, Spain was subjected to British diplomatic and economic power, designed to ensure the country complied with the British Empire’s strategic and commercial interests. Supported by Britain’s use of military force at key moments of crisis, this amounted to ‘informal imperialism’, as described by Gallagher and Robinson in their famous 1953 article, which suggested free trade imperialism drove the expansion of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. The experience left Spain with a number of economic and political legacies that undermined its capacity to develop a modernised economy. This article explores three of the most important effects: an unbalanced economy, deepened political divisions, and increasingly autarkic political and economic policies. It concludes that the Spanish experience was a harbinger of a more general process of imperial economic colonisation by the new commercial powers that emerged from the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, led by Britain. It suggests these legacies were also evident in the newly independent post-Second World War colonies as they freed themselves from the grip of the European empires.

Global Territorialization and Mining Frontiers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Capitalist Anxieties and the Circulation of Knowledge between British and Habsburgian Imperial Spaces, ca. 1820–1850

AbstractThe rumors of Brazil’s mineral riches reaching London and Vienna in the first half of the nineteenth century, started by enslaved Africans mining clandestinely in unexplored regions and later through geological surveys by mining engineers from the Habsburg Empire, prompted aspirations to wealth which circulated fluidly in the transatlantic context. This article examines the distinct but convergent agencies of garimpeiros, enslaved miners and prospectors, and of Habsburgian mining engineers in the territorialization process of Minas Gerais during the nineteenth-century expansion of global capitalism. It analyses the degree of connectivity and cooperation across British and Habsburgian imperial spaces in Brazilian mining ventures, focusing on the case of the mining engineer Virgil von Helmreichen, who arrived in Minas Gerais in 1836, under contract to the British-financed Imperial Brazilian Mining Association. The Habsburgian expert elite of which Helmreichen was a part played a crucial role in the expansion of the commodity frontier in this region, providing proficient knowledge in mining and geology. This expert community collaborated with the logistics networks of British free-trade imperialism and the Brazilian slave system inherited from the colonial period. The territorialization of Minas Gerais shows the global dynamics at play between British interests in the discovery of new mines, the need to produce expert knowledge at the local level, and the Brazilian government’s desire to control the hinterland region and profit from its mineral wealth.

Informal Empire: The Origin and Significance of a Key Term

Ever since the publication of “The Imperialism of Free Trade” by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson in 1953, “informal empire” has been a key term for historians. It has, however, always been contentious. The central issue was whether imperial historians were prepared to accept a new concept of empire. This article explains the paradox of informal empire by creating a stronger provenance for the term. Since the early nineteenth century, imperial metaphors have been used to characterize Britain's position in the world economy. Gallagher and Robinson—like their immediate predecessors, Charles Fay and Keith Hancock—wanted to understand British imperialism in the broader context of European expansion while also formulating an alternative to the radical liberal and neo-Marxist interpretations widely current after World War I. Ultimately, the difficulty of using “empire” as a single category led Gallagher and one of his most influential successors to choose an alternative term.

Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power

Collaboration, Resistance, and Imperial Power Ian W. Campbell (bio) Graduate school recruitment is an odd time to make a friend. Yet in 2005, drinking overpriced beer at an off-campus bar in Ann Arbor with Maya Peterson, I knew immediately that I had found one. In the years that followed, she proved to be a brilliant, generous, and supportive colleague, with whom it was always a joy to think through the nature of Russian imperialism in Central Asia. It is still hard to believe and unbearably sad that we must talk about these questions—about the issues that her work helped us understand—not with her on an adventurous hike or after a full day of conference panels, but without her. Indeed, Peterson’s wonderful first book, Pipe Dreams, sheds light on several perennial issues not only in the historiography of the Russian Empire but in the history of imperialism more generally.1 In particular, it highlights the importance of cooperation and collaboration in sustaining imperial ventures, and the potential for resistance to such ventures in both the inhabitants and environment in Russian Turkestan. In Pipe Dreams, neither water nor people can be easily coerced to achieve a desired outcome. Since the publication of Ronald Robinson’s seminal piece in 1972, it has become a commonplace that “imperialism was as much a function of its victims’ collaboration or non-collaboration … as it was of European expansion.”2 This is an insight applicable not only to the forms that imperial rule took (i.e., settlement, occupation, or the “imperialism of free trade”) but to the fate of specific ventures within a colony. This is not to say that such cooperation, when it occurred, took place on equal terms; Peterson rightly follows Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “cooperation is a state of affairs that [End Page 345] involves … [parties] of different economic capability and that may not be regarded as especially desirable by some of the parties involved.”3 That very inequality, the tenuousness of the arrangements into which colonial administrators entered with local power brokers, forced the latter into a set of what Michael Khodarkovsky has called “bitter choices,” seeding the potential for resistance even in ostensibly collaborative ventures.4 The Russian Empire, like any other, depended on the support of local elites to implement and articulate its visions—indeed, often to secure the cooperation (or at least quiescence) of the population of its colonies. When it failed to offer sufficient incentives to cooperate, or its ambitions went beyond what colonial subjects could bear, its ambitions were jeopardized. The weakness of tsarist rule in Central Asia and its consequent dependence on local power structures and customs stood at variance with the self-image of the men who made the empire and fundamentally constrained the projects they might undertake; this was the case both in the Turkestan Governor-Generalship and the vassal states of Bukhara and Khiva.5 It was one thing to “project imperialist notions of modernity, civilization, and progress” onto the Central Asian landscape, but to put these notions into practice was quite another.6 Tsarist and other European observers found much to criticize about Central Asian water management and hoped by introducing new technologies and techniques of irrigation to both foster the economic development of the colony and legitimate their own rule. Canal systems and dams looked “primitive” and “incorrect”; methods of surveying and water measurement appeared to be frustratingly imprecise; the whole enterprise required a backbreaking amount of physical labor.7 But as a matter of pragmatism, particularly in the first decades after the conquest of Central Asia, they had little choice but to devolve authority to native administrators and acquiesce to customs, practices, and technologies that they disliked. [End Page 346] Local authorities were important for water management because of both who they were and what they knew. Attempts by the first governor-general of Turkestan, Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman, to assert Russian bureaucratic control over the region’s water resources were short-lived. Statutory law in Turkestan conformed, for the most part, not to this abortive measure but to the general direction of Kaufman’s viceregal rule, intervening only hesitantly to avoid provoking disturbances in the...

Natural trading partners versus empires in East and Southeast Asia regional integration (1840-1938)

The present article tries to contribute to the literature dealing with the history of regional integration in East and Southeast Asia, reconciling the arguments defending that those territories are natural trading partners, those supporting that Western Empires enabled integration, and the ones claiming that it was the Japanese Empire which expanded regional trade. With this purpose, we reconstruct the region's bilateral imports before the establishment of Free Trade Areas and pioneer the econometric analysis of the main drivers of the commercial integration of East and Southeast Asia as a whole during the high colonial era (1840-1938). Our results display that countries' specific economic and cultural characteristics made them natural trading partners. However, intra-Asian trade acceleration during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries was possible by the British imperialism of free trade and Japanese planned industrialization.

Crisis, narratives, and the construction of US-Middle East relations: continuity and change in world history and Trump’s America First

ABSTRACT This article sets out a novel constructivist conception of how we can analyse continuity and change in US foreign policy, and sets out the US relationship with the Middle East within the context of world history. It shows how the US has worked towards an imperium and deployed an imperial right over the long durée. The Trump administration has maintained this tradition. However, by better understanding the role and impact of crises, it is argued that analysts can be far more sensitive to the role of ideas and how reasons for action shape foreign policy. It is shown that the Trump administration adopts an America first policy-paradigm that moves away from a focus on free trade imperialism and towards indirect rule through authoritarian strongmen. Using advanced computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software it is demonstrated that the Global Financial Crisis opened a period of paradigm contestation.

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

On the Origins and Legacies of Really Existing Capitalism: In Conversation with Kari Polanyi Levitt

Biography and the Making of Transnational Imperialism: Karl Gützlaff on the China Coast, 1831–1851

ABSTRACT This essay challenges the ‘methodological territorialism’ and ‘methodological nationalism’ prevalent in recent studies of imperial biographies, examining the role of the German Karl Friedrich August Gützlaff (1801–1851) in establishing a transnational form of free-trade imperialism in China. A native of Prussia and a missionary by training, Gützlaff was first posted in the Netherlands East Indies before associating himself with British interests on the China coast. However, his loyalty was not limited to one imperialist power. In the 1840s, Gützlaff promoted German trade with China, and at certain points of time he also supported American as well as Scandinavian interests. In addition to making a name for himself as a cultural broker and promoter of free trade and diplomatic representation, he also became involved with various forms of imperialism, from the more fluid commercial variant to the more formalised power structures of territorial rule. The case of Gützlaff therefore lends itself to a reflection about the permeable and shifting boundaries of empires. Moreover, it calls for a reassessment of German imperialism in the period before 1871, showing how Germany's involvement with ‘Western’ global expansion was palpable and not merely confined to the realm of colonial fantasy.

毛利健三著, 『自由貿易帝国主義 : イギリス産業資本の世界展開』, 東京大学出版会、一九七八年、三四〇〇円

毛利健三著, 『自由貿易帝国主義 : イギリス産業資本の世界展開』, 東京大学出版会、一九七八年、三四〇〇円

Caleb Cushing and the corporate romance of free trade imperialism in Washington Irving's Astoria (1836)

AbstractIn 1838 the Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing's invoked Washington Irving's Astoria (1836) in a Congressional speech that warned against the tyranny of British corporate monopolies and pleaded for the annexation of Oregon. This essay compares Cushing's and Irving's views on the viability of US commerce in the Far East and Far West and considers the rhetorical force of corporate form in nationalising commercial activity through narratives that portray merchant princes as heroes of free trade imperialism.

Trading with the “Enemy”? Hong Kong Bourgeoisie and Chinese Nationalism during the Two Wars, 1919–1941

This paper examines the interplay between trade and nationalism in the development of Chinese bourgeois nationalism in British Hong Kong in the interwar years (1919–1941). It points out the contingent responses among the Chinese bourgeoisie to the calls of Chinese nationalism. The bourgeoisie were lukewarm to the mobilization of the Chinese anti-British strikes and boycotts in the 1920s. They however organized fundraising movements and charities to support the Chinese defence against the Japanese inroads in the 1930s. The implication of the findings is twofold: first, the operation of Chinese antiforeigner movements in Hong Kong was not “taught nationalism” dictated by nationalists in mainland China. Second, while Chinese bourgeoisie identified the Japanese expansion as a reason for the British decline, they did not attempt to interrupt the Japanese trade. The latter was crucial for the Chinese manufacturers in Hong Kong to sustain their business. The agency of Chinese in Hong Kong in the decades of high Chinese nationalism points to the importance of examining Chinese bourgeois nationalism in Hong Kong against the backdrop of the colony’s place in the inter-imperialist rivalry between the demise of the British free-trade imperialism and the rise of the Japanese East Asian New Order. (This article is in Chinese.)

Friedrich List and the Imperial origins of the national economy

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List's theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core–periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. I explain this ambivalence with reference to List's designation of imperial Britain as the prime example of successful economic development and a model to be emulated by late industrialisers. List thereby fashioned his ideas on national development out of the historical experience of an empire whereby he internalised its economic logic and discourse of the civilising mission. Consequently, List's national economy culminated in an early vision of the global north–south relations, in which the global industrial-financial core would expand to include France, Germany and the USA, while the rest of the world would be reduced to quasi-colonial agrarian hinterlands.

ReOrienting the 19th century: global economy in the continuing Asian age

1 Debunk Mythology, ReOrient Reality 2 Continuity and Transformation: A Biblio-Methodological Introduction 3 Worldwide Continuity More Than Change: 1750s-1810s 4 Triangles for Capital Accumulation and Entropy Dissipation 5 Late-Nineteenth-Century Triangles 6 Regional Continuity and Some Transitions: 1810s-1870s 7 Imperialism of Free Trade and Colonialism: 1870-1913 8 Regional Divisions of Costs and Benefits: 1870s-1914 9 A Prelude to a Conclusion Robert A. Denemark 10 ReOrienting the Twentieth Century

The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market by Francesca Sawaya (review)

Reviewed by: The Difficult Art Of Giving: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market by Francesca Sawaya Bell Julian Clement THE DIFFICULT ART OF GIVING: Patronage, Philanthropy, and the American Literary Market. By Francesca Sawaya. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. This collection of five essays from literary historian Francesca Sawaya examines the evolving American practice of philanthropy from the Gilded Age into the first third of the twentieth century through the writings of Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens, Charles Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser. The essays trace the patterns of philanthropic giving depicted in their works and consider the role of philanthropy in the careers of each. Sawaya calls on the writings of Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockefeller to observe that philanthropy plays an ambiguous role in a “free market” society. Philanthropic interventions are necessary to fill the gaps left by the market and allow the society to function, but these very interventions call into question the assumptions of market equity and efficiency on which the society is founded. The role of philanthropy in literary production is equally problematic: artists are hedged in, ideologically as well as practically, by the social constructs which produce the gifts that support their art. The works of Sawaya’s five literary observers illustrate the uncertainty and circuity of philanthropy’s impacts. The patronage offered political radicals by James’s Princess Casamassima is queered by the bitterness that motivates her. Only when giving is institutionalized, [End Page 134] suggests James, as in the plan of The Golden Bowl’s Adam Verver to establish a grand public art gallery, may its inherently questionable motives be transmuted into worthy outcomes. In Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes, editor Basil March can hardly be unaware that the doubtful source of the philanthropy that makes his new literary venture possible—the profits that capitalist Jacob Dryfoos sweats out of his workers—gives the lie to the critical “detachment” he wishes to claim for it. Howells suggests the circumstances under which artistic independence may survive philanthropy in the character of Alma Leighton—a freelancer who accepts sponsorship but declines to be grateful. Twain sends a Yankee into King Arthur’s court bearing managerial capitalism as his gift and blind to the devastating impacts of his “scientific philanthropy” on that society; such philanthropy becomes “relatively innocuous, perhaps even promising” only in comparison to the depredations of free-trade imperialism limned in such late Twain essays as “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (133). In The Colonel’s Dream, Chesnutt leads Colonel French to the realization that well-intentioned northern philanthropy serves only to exacerbate violence in the southern town he had hoped to help in its refusal to address fundamental questions of social and racial justice. Chesnutt holds out the hope that a return to those fundamentals could enable a productive philanthropy. Dreiser shows that his financial titan, Frank Cowperwood, is dependent upon dense “networks of connection” in navigating a market system that, far from “free,” works “through carefully constructed and nurtured patronage systems” (183). For all his manipulative ability, Cowperwood’s philanthropic successes are ironic, his real achievements other than what he intended them to be. Sawaya’s tracing of the operation of philanthropy in the works of these American masters highlights the fiction of the “free market”—dependent as it as on philanthropic and other interventions for its survival—to which American society remains enthralled. Her explorations likewise reveal the fond fiction of a free, meritocratic market in literary production, showing that the production of these authors relied on complex webs of friendship and sponsorship. Bell Julian Clement The George Washington University Copyright © 2015 Mid-America American Studies Association

CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE PROBLEM OF COLONIAL SLAVERY, 1823–1833

ABSTRACTAnna Gambles'sProtection and politics(1999) established the existence of a sophisticated and pervasive conservative economic discourse in Britain in the decades before Repeal. This article argues that the imperial aspect of that discourse – comprising ideals of imperial economic integration, imperial preference, and British navigational prowess – has been mistakenly understood as a response to ‘the imperialism of free trade'. In fact, these ideals were evolved primarily as the intellectual response of the West Indian lobby to the Anti-Slavery Society's campaign for the emancipation of British colonial slaves. Emancipation was regarded as a prospective economic disaster for the British plantation system and so the years after 1823 witnessed the vigorous and sophisticated defence of West Indian slavery by rhetorical and discursive means traditionally ascribed the label of ‘conservative economics'. This article argues that the imperial economic discourse hitherto considered ‘conservative’ should more properly be recognized as ‘pro-slavery’, something underscored by the pro-slavery sympathies of the writers credited with the articulation of this discourse, and by the almost exclusive relevance of its arguments to West Indian, as opposed to other colonial possessions.

TRANSNATIONAL PROJECTS OF EMPIRE IN FRANCE,C.1815–C.1870

Rather than renouncing empire after the fall of Napoleon, this essay argues, French liberal thinkers expressed a sustained preference for a strategy based on transnational connections, or what imperial historians describe as informal imperialism. The eulogy of European Christian civilization exemplified by François Guizot's lecture at the Sorbonne in 1828 served not only to legitimize French global ambitions, but also to facilitate cooperation with other European imperial powers, especially Britain, and indigenous collaborators. Liberal enthusiasm for the spread of Western civilization also inspired the emergence of a French version of free-trade imperialism, of which the economist Michel Chevalier proved a consistent advocate. Only when such aspirations were frustrated did liberals reluctantly endorse colonial conquest, on an exceptional basis in Algeria after 1840 and on a global scale after 1870. The allegedly abrupt liberal conversion to empire in the nineteenth century may instead be construed as a tactical shift from informal to formal dominance.

‘Naked abroad’: The continuing imperialism of free trade

This article draws on Gallagher and Robinson (1953) and combines their concepts with insights offered by, amongst others, Callinicos, Eagleton and Harvey, in order to demonstrate continuities between British and US imperialism. They include the willingness of states to engage in imperial action (despite public statements of anti-imperial sentiment); the use of formal and informal control to secure the frontiers of a state’s expanding economy; and the operation of imperialism through collaboration. In order to avoid the problems of earlier Marxist-Leninist interpretations of British imperialism, and in order to extend the analysis, the concepts of ideology, elites and neoliberalism are applied.

The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890-1913

Debunking the common laissez-faire myth surrounding turn-of-the-century American foreign relations allows for a reconceptualization of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal disagreements over the future of the protectionist system and U.S. imperial expansion. From within Republican protectionist ranks arose a progressive wing that increasingly looked beyond the home market for the country’s growing American agricultural and manufacturing surpluses. They did so against staunch anti-imperial opposition not only from American free-trade independents, but also from the Republican Party’s isolationist home-market protectionists, who yet feared or disdained foreign markets and colonial acquisitions. These progressive Republican proponents of empire combined coercive trade reciprocity with protectionism—an expansive closed door—and worked hard to extend American imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed U.S.-controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity if possible, by formal annexation and military interventionism when necessary. The American Empire thus arose owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade.

The Articulation of an Independent Foreign Policy

Canadian trade and investment in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an element of British world hegemony and its particular form of free-trade imperialism, laid the groundwork for Canada’s first independent foreign policy toward Latin America. The Canadian state’s articulation of its interest in Latin America in the 1940s was associated with the end of British hegemony and the rise of the United States as the new world hegemon. It is apparent that Canada’s location as a wealthy though politically less powerful nation within the core of the capitalist world system dates to the late nineteenth century and that Canadian capitalists played a significant role in this articulation. El comercio de Canadá y la inversión en América Latina en el siglo XX y principios del XIX, característico de la hegemonía mundial británica y de su forma particular de imperialismo del libre comercio, sentó las bases de la primera política exterior independiente de Canadá hacia América Latina. La articulación del Estado canadiense de su interés en América Latina en la década de 1940 estuvo asociada con el fin de la hegemonía británica y el surgimiento de los Estados Unidos como potencia hegemónica del nuevo mundo. Es evidente que la ubicación de Canadá como una nación rica, aunque políticamente menos potente, en el centro del sistema capitalista mundial se remonta a finales del siglo XIX y que los capitalistas canadienses tuvieron un papel importante en esta articulación.

The Failure of Trade's Empire in The History of Emily Montague

The contingencies of applying free trade imperialism to an impoverished Canada in the 1760s force the characters in Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague to abandon the sentimental colonial project, retreating to England to establish their domestic Utopia. Other critics have read Emily Montague's relation to the colonial project as ambiguous; I agree but relate these ambiguities not to the novel's gender or colonial practices, but to its economic ideology of global laissez-faire capitalism. Brooke's novel tries to narrate a plot of infinite wealth accumulation, but Canada's particular political and economic problems will not abide. The novel ends up laying bare the contradictions at the heart of this emerging liberal economic theory.