Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power Read Free Page B

turn were in some measure the heirs of Richard Cobden and John Bright in the 1840s and 1850s. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith had expressed his doubts about the wisdom of ‘raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers, all the goods with which these could supply them’. But it was Cobden who had originally insisted that the expansion of British trade should go hand in hand with a foreign policy of complete non-intervention. Commerce alone, he maintained, was ‘the grand panacea’,
    which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world. Not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our seats of manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace, and good government – whilst our steamboats, that now visit every port of Europe, and our miraculous railroads, that are the talk of all nations, are the advertisements and vouchers for the value of our enlightened institutions.
     
    The critical point for Cobden was that neither trade nor even the spread of British ‘civilization’ needed to be enforced by imperial structures. Indeed, the use of force could achieve nothing if it sought to run counter to the beneficent laws of the global free market:
    So far as our commerce is concerned, it can neither be sustained nor greatly injured abroad by force or violence. The foreign customers who visit our markets are not brought hither through fear of the power or the influence of British diplomatists: they are not captured by our fleets and armies ... It is solely from the promptings of self interest that the merchants of Europe, as of the rest of the world, send their ships to our ports to be freighted with the products of our labour. The self-same impulse drew all nations, at different periods of history, to Tyre, to Venice, and to Amsterdam; and if, in the revolution of time and events, a country should be found (which is probable) whose cottons and woollens shall be cheaper than those of England and the rest of the world, then to that spot ... will all the traders of the earth flock; and no human power, no fleets or armies, will prevent Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds, from sharing the fate of their once proud predecessors in Holland, Italy, and Phoenicia ...
     
    Thus there was no need for an Empire; trade would take care of itself – and everything else too, including world peace. In May 1856 Cobden went so far as to say that it would ‘be a happy day when England has not an acre of territory in Continental Asia’.
    The common factor in all such arguments was and remains, however, the assumption that the benefits of international exchange could have been and can be reaped without the costs of empire. To put it more concisely: can you have globalization without gunboats?

Empire and Globalization
     
    It has become almost a commonplace that globalization today has much in common with the integration of the world economy in the decades before 1914. But what exactly does this overused word mean? Is it, as Cobden implied, an economically determined phenomenon, in which the free exchange of commodities and manufactures tends ‘to unite mankind in the bonds of peace’? Or might free trade require a political framework within which to work?
    The leftist opponents of globalization naturally regard it as no more than the latest manifestation of a damnably resilient international capitalism. By contrast, the modern consensus among liberal economists is that increasing economic openness raises living standards, even if there will always be some net losers as hitherto privileged or protected social groups are exposed to international competition. But economists and economic historians alike prefer to