------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (October 2008)

Frank Trentmann, _Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil 
Society in Modern Britain_. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 
450 pp. ?25/$50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-19-920920-0.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter J. Cain, Department of History, Sheffield 
Hallam University.


In discussions and analyses of trade regimes in Britain from the late 
nineteenth century through to the 1930s, protectionist campaigns have 
hogged most of the attention of historians and free trade -- the ruling 
regime before the 1930s -- has been relatively neglected.  For that 
reason alone, Frank Trentmann?s account of free trade and its supporters 
would be a welcome addition to the literature: the bonus is that author, 
Professor of History at Birkbeck College in London University, has not 
only added a great deal to our knowledge through painstaking research 
but has written about it with verve and energy and produced a most 
readable volume on a subject that can be very dull indeed.

Trentmann?s case is that support for free trade in Edwardian Britain did 
not mainly rely on calculations of interest, though he does not totally 
ignore that, but was driven by a highly emotional, even passionate, 
commitment akin to nationalist or religious fervor, and was seen by its 
advocates as a crucial element in defining what they thought of as 
Britishness. He admits that around 1900 the free trade movement was in 
poor shape as foreign manufactured imports mounted and foreign tariffs 
rose, and that some form of protectionism was being discussed even at 
government level. Chamberlain?s tariff campaign starting in 1903 changed 
all that. Faced with a clear and open challenge, the free trade cause 
gathered an astonishing momentum which swept the previously ailing 
Liberal party into office in 1906 and helped to keep them there through 
two further elections. Masterminded by the Free Trade Union (which, 
ironically, learned much from its rival the Tariff Reform League) the 
electorate was aroused by a campaign of propaganda that successfully 
associated protection with poverty by reminding the nation of the 
?Hungry Forties? when protection had last held sway. The free traders 
also succeeded in accusing protectionists of attempting to revive an 
oppressive state; of undermining free trade?s natural tendency to bring 
peace through economic interdependence; and of serving the interests of 
a minority of landed and business elites whom they branded as selfish 
vested interests, intent on creating monopolies and cartels that would 
exploit the majority of the nation. As Trentmann acutely notes, the 
campaign had a great effect in politicizing women as key consumers and, 
more widely, in putting consumers? interests at the center of policy, 
something that anticipates many modern political movements. All this 
made for a very lively politics that sometimes erupted into violence and 
which led to extraordinary organizational developments, such as the 
great series of lectures and entertainments that the FTU took to the 
seaside towns of Britain.

After 1914, that momentum proved increasing hard to sustain. The war 
shook faith in laisser-faire and made state control and big business 
seem much more natural. Under state auspices, some protection was 
introduced to regulate imports and ensure that they served the cause of 
winning the war: free trade thus began to appear as a policy that 
ministered to individual needs rather than to the national interest. 
That encouraged the idea of ?safeguarding? key industries after the war 
in case conflict should erupt again; and the much higher unemployment 
rates in the 1920s also undermined the long-held idea that free trade 
naturally meant prosperity. Again, the rise of nutritional science meant 
that more stress was placed on health and the need for the state to 
improve it, rather than on the ?cheapness? lauded by free traders that 
now began to seem synonymous with undernourishment and poverty. 
Moreover, free trade had clearly failed to keep the peace 
internationally and radicals who had once been fervent Cobdenites were 
thinking, by the 1920s, much more of the need for international 
organizations like the League of Nations to regulate international 
intercourse rather than relying on the invisible hand of the market. As 
visions of world peace and prosperity under free trade were challenged, 
empire increased in appeal and, naturally enough, greater stress was 
placed on the need to bind the empire to Britain through tariffs. All 
this served to undermine the great cultural movement that had 
transformed the Edwardian political scene and by the time the world 
economy began to collapse in the early 1930s, free trade was viewed not 
as the cement binding the nation together but as the belief of a 
relatively few staunch individualists who were out of touch with the 
times.

There is far more in this fine book than can be represented here and 
Trentmann makes a powerful case for his interpretation of the evidence. 
It may be, however, that he underestimates the fragility of the 
commitment to free trade before 1914, thus making its decline in the 
1920s seem more precipitous than it was. Trentmann recognizes that 
Chamberlain was a godsend to free traders but he does not say enough 
about how easy he made it for them. Firstly, he split the Conservative 
party thus making it impossible for them at the 1906 election; secondly, 
in highlighting imperial preference he failed to garner the level of 
support that a more wholehearted commitment to domestic protection would 
have given. It may be true, as Trentmann contends, that effective 
organization by free traders was crucial to victory in the 1910 
elections: but it is still the case that the Liberals only won the two 
elections of that year by a whisker, despite the fact that protectionism 
was still hobbled by disunity. Protectionists were also unlucky in their 
timing: Chamberlain launched his campaign just at the beginning of the 
long Edwardian boom. Support for protection increased sharply in the 
brief downturn of 1908-09, and if economic times had been harder free 
trade might have disappeared sooner. If this is so, it may put in 
question the depth of the moral commitment to free trade that Trentmann 
lays such stress upon. It may also suggest the need for a 
counterbalancing reinvestigation of the importance of interest in 
maintaining free trade before 1914 and in undermining it after that date.


Peter J. Cain is Professor of History at Sheffield Hallam University, 
UK. E-mail: p.j.cain at shu.ac.uk  He is the author of _Hobson and 
Imperialism: Radicalism, New Liberalism and Finance, 1887-1938_ (Oxford, 
2002).

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