scholarly journals 'Free Trade' and the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century State Competition

2021 ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
James Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Trade Policy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Labor Discipline ◽  
British Trade ◽  
National Power

This chapter offers a fresh examination of the transformation of British trade policy in the later 18th and early 19th centuries. It reconsiders the 'rise of free trade' as a mutation, rather than a rejection, of an earlier 'mercantilist' logic of national power competition. Examining the writings of the Anglo-Dutch merchant Matthew Decker alongside those of the better-known Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, this chapter identifies a switch from a competition over trade balances in precious metals, to an all-pervasive struggle for labor discipline and productivity, applying not just to princes and rulers but entire 'nations'. The reduction of tariffs and the abolition of monopolies emerges as a means of enhancing the productive power of the nation, and its related capacity for funding military conflict.

Richard Harris, Slave Trader Spokesman

1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Rawley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
International Market ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Record ◽  
American Trade

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Douglas A. Irwin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
International Trade ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Environmental Regulation ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
World Trade ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
The World

This chapter provides a background on why free trade is considered to be a desirable policy. It explains whether the most frequently made criticisms of free trade, such as its adverse impact on workers and the environment, have merit. It discusses what is the World Trade Organization (WTO), as well as how world trade rules erode a country's sovereignty and undermine its health and environmental regulation. The chapter also introduces basic economic principles and empirical evidence regarding international trade and trade policy. It mentions the perspective on free trade that was originally developed by David Hume and Adam Smith in eighteenth-century Scotland.

The New World of Adam Smith

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
New World ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Trade Competition

This chapter examines Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution, which came to England and southern Scotland in the last third of the eighteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, the workers who previously had been producing goods in their cottages or food and wool on their farms moved to the factories and the factory towns. Merchants began to invest their capital in factories and machinery or in the far from munificent wages that kept alive the workers. This change was made possible by the industrialist, whose orientation was to the production of goods, rather than their purchase or sale. The chapter discusses Smith's views on a variety of subjects, which he articulated in the Wealth of Nations, including borrowing, capitalism, free trade, competition, credit, distribution, innovation, justice, labor, manufacturing, merchants, monopolies, political economy, prices, production and productivity, profit, public policy, rent, standard of living, and value.

From Politics to Technocracy—and Back Again: The Fate of the Multilateral Trading Regime

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Howse
Keyword(s):  
Trade Policy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Comparative Advantage ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Trade Law ◽  
Law And Policy ◽  
Modern Idea ◽  
David Ricardo ◽  
Trading Regime

As is known to every student of trade law and policy, the modern idea of free trade originates from the theories of absolute and comparative advantage developed by the classical political economists, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Smith and Ricardo both addressed themselves to a sovereign unilaterally deciding its trade policy. They concluded that, with some qualifications or exceptions, a policy of liberalizing restrictions on imports would maximize the wealth of that sovereign.

The Tercentenary of Henry Martyn's Considerations upon the East-India Trade

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Maneschi
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Welfare ◽  
Real Cost ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Impact

Henry Martyn's Considerations Upon the East-India Trade, published anonymously in 1701, stands out as a major contribution to the field of political economy that took root in Britain in the eighteenth century, and to the demonstration of the gains from free trade (Martyn 1701). Martyn provided one of the earliest formulations (and by far the clearest) of what Jacob Viner termed the “eighteenth-century rule” for the gains from trade, that “it pays to import commodities from abroad whenever they can be obtained in exchange for exports at a smaller real cost than their production at home would entail” (Viner 1937, p. 440). The numerical examples that Martyn used to illustrate it went even beyond the case for free trade advanced seventy-five years later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Martyn's tract contains other remarkable insights that became important features of classical political economy, such as the nature and advantages of the division of labor, the dependence of the latter on the extent of the market, the workings of a market economy, the role of money, and the impact of international trade on resource allocation, on productivity, and on economic welfare.

‘Less Abused than I had Reason to Expect’: The Reception of The Wealth of Nations in Britain, 1776–90

1987 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Teichgraeber
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Economic Thinking ◽  
Limited Process

When Adam Smith set out to re-shape the dominant economic policies and assumptions of his time, he knew success in pressing for ‘free trade’ would depend on his ability to imprint his views on the minds of contemporary statesmen and legislators. But he was never confident that this operation might take place during his lifetime. In the Wealth of Nations, he declared that to expect freedom of trade to be accepted entirely in Great Britain was ‘as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it’, and this was by no means an offhand remark. Much of the massive book was coloured by Smith's awareness that liberal economic doctrines, whatever their considerable intellectual merits, ran far ahead of actual political and social attitudes in eighteenth-century Europe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a variety of political and economic developments of course refuted Smith's view that ‘free trade’ was an unattainable ideal. But the historical verification of his economic thinking was a slow, difficult, and limited process.

Free Trade versus Protection : Static and Dynamic Aspects

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Gunnar Flфystad
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Trade Policy ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Optimal Taxation ◽  
Foreign Trade Policy ◽  
Taxation Policy

This paper analyses whether the developing countries are pursuing an optimal foreign trade policy, given the theoretical and empirical evidence we have. The paper concludes that constraints in imposing other taxes than tariffs in many developing countries may justify having tariffs as part of an optimal taxation policy.

Free Trade before Liberalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Tazzara
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Free Trade Zone ◽  
Central Mediterranean ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Institutional Variation ◽  
Intellectual Legacy

Chapter 8 situates Livorno amidst a larger picture of competition in the central Mediterranean. It analyzes the spread of free ports by considering the two axes along which Italian ports liberalized during the early modern period: hospitality toward merchants and openness toward goods. Despite much institutional variation, a maritime free trade zone was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century. The intellectual legacy of free ports such as Livorno was nonetheless ambivalent. Though some Enlightenment thinkers used free ports to formulate general theories of free trade, others believed they promoted the subjection of state policy to foreign merchants.

Moral canals: trust and social capital in the work of Hume, Smith and Genovesi

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigino Bruni ◽  
Robert Sugden
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institution ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Economic Agents ◽  
Trading Partners ◽  
History Of

It is a truism that a market economy cannot function without trust. We must be able to rely on other people to respect our property rights, and on our trading partners to keep their promises. The theory of economics is incomplete unless it can explain why economic agents often trust one another, and why that trust is often repaid. There is a long history of work in economics and philosophy which tries to explain the kinds of reasoning that people use when they engage in practices of trust: this work develops theories of trust. A related tradition in economics, sociology and political science investigates the kinds of social institution that reproduce whatever habits, dispositions or modes of reasoning are involved in acts of trust: this work develops theories of social capital. A recurring question in these literatures is whether a society which organizes its economic life through markets is capable of reproducing the trust on which those markets depend. In this paper, we look at these themes in relation to the writings of three eighteenth-century philosopher-economists: David Hume, Adam Smith, and Antonio Genovesi.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document