------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: Trade and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.

Published by EH.NET (October 2010)

Andrew Hamilton, /Trade and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World/.
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. vii + 168 pp.
$70 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84718-837-0.

Reviewed by for EH.NET by John C. Coombs, Department of History,
Hampden-Sydney College.

Readers of Andrew Hamilton’s /Trade and Empire in the Eighteenth-Century
Atlantic World/ are going to find something quite different than the
broad-ranging, and perhaps even comparative study that the book’s title
suggests.  What Hamilton offers instead is a relatively short, accessible,
and focused examination of new ideas about political economy, particularly
concerning the subject of free trade, that circulated among English and
Scottish (and to a lesser extent French) intellectuals in the latter decades
of the eighteenth century, as well as the failed attempts -- undertaken by
British prime minister Lord Shelburne and his personal secretary Benjamin
Vaughan on the one hand, and U.S. president John Adams on the other -- to
translate those ideas into policy during the years following the American
Revolution.

After an introduction in which Hamilton describes his interpretive approach
and its grounding in the works of J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, and Felix
Gilbert, the book’s argument progresses along two threads.  The first is a
sort of primer on key elements of free-trade ideology -- from ideas about the
proper role of the state in the economy and the genealogy of “laissez
faire,” through the problem of trade imbalances between states at differing
levels of economic development, to the belief that unfettered commerce could
bring an end to conflict and encourage amity among nations. The second thread
has an almost biographical character, as Hamilton sketches the backgrounds of
Shelburne and Vaughan and their connections with various economic theorists
and religious nonconformists, as well as the ties Vaughan had developed with
the American diplomats negotiating the 1783 Treaty of Paris, particularly
Benjamin Franklin. The two tracks come together in a penultimate chapter
discussing Vaughan’s 1788 treatise /New and Old Principles of Trade/, which
is followed by a brief conclusion in which Hamilton analyses how restrictive
British trade laws prompted the Adams administration to abandon its free
trade position and adopt a more protectionist stance.

Interweaving these two threads, Hamilton contends that Shelburne sought to
apply Enlightenment notions of political economy at the peace negotiations in
Paris, which he hoped would lead to either a reformed empire tied together by
commerce rather than territorial dominion or, failing that, a mutually
beneficial relationship between Britain and an independent America based on
free trade.  Hamilton elucidates this connection between theory and policy
quite well, and his arguments for the importance of Vaughan’s
contributions, both as a thinker and as a vital intermediary during the Paris
talks, are also compelling and persuasive. But the British government issued
an Order in Council prohibiting the United States from trading with the West
Indian colonies and Parliament’s dissatisfaction with the peace treaty
forced Shelburne to resign as Prime Minister, thus begging the question of
why the policy he and Vaughan wanted and worked for was ultimately rejected.
If Britain’s protectionism brought an end to the “liberal moment” in
American foreign policy, as Hamilton asserts, what caused British officials
to pursue the course they did in the first place?

Hamilton all but ignores this question, including no discussion of
Parliament’s deliberations over the peace treaty or the arguments put
forward by Shelburne’s political opponents.  Similarly, although he notes
that Vaughan unsuccessfully fought to have the Order in Council rescinded as
a member of the Committee of West India Merchants and Planters, he does not
explain what this organization did or examine the reasoning behind the
government’s response.  Was it simply that a majority of the men in power
were just too lacking in vision and too wedded to established conceptions of
empire to see the potential benefits of embracing free trade? Because of
Hamilton’s silence, the reader can only guess. To be fair, in the
introduction Hamilton sets for himself the task of revealing how new theories
of political economy were practically applied in the pursuit of a political
settlement to the problems confronting the British Empire in the late
eighteenth century, and he does a solid job of meeting that objective.  Yet
by declining to more fully describe the intellectual and political resistance
to policy grounded in the “new principles” espoused by theorists such as
Adam Smith and Vaughan, he does not provide the reader with any real sense of
the debate over trade and empire in the period, and the result is a book that
is less satisfying than it otherwise might have been.

Still, /Trade and Empire/ has much to recommend it.  Although it is
difficult to say how helpful experts in the history of political economy will
find the book given its heavy reliance on secondary scholarship that is
likely well-known to specialists, graduate students who are less steeped in
the literature will doubtlessly find Hamilton’s concise summary of key
concepts and syntheses of disparate works to be quite helpful and thought
provoking.  At a time when issues relating to free trade are constantly in
the news, the book would be an excellent addition to any history or economics
class focusing on the subject of political economy, and could potentially add
an interesting angle to courses on the American Revolution.  Unfortunately,
its rather steep price renders adopting it for undergraduate teaching a
rather problematic proposition.

John C. Coombs, Associate Professor of History at Hampden-Sydney College, is
co-editor, with Douglas Bradburn, of /Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering
the Old Dominion/ and author of /The Rise of Virginia Slavery/, both of which
are forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press.

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Geographic Location: Europe, North America
Subject: International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Time: 18th Century