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  • War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689–1900
  • Nicholas Alexander
John V. C. Nye . War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. xvi + 174 pp. ISBN 13 978-0-691-12917-4 (cloth).

This is not a long book: an introduction and eight chapters amounting to 120 pages with additional appendices. However, it eruditely covers and raises a wide variety of intriguing issues that give it far greater impact than the slim volume might at first suggest.

The book is fundamentally about challenging the assertion that Britain was a free trader in the nineteenth century and was a free trader when compared specifically with France. From the outset, John Nye sets out on a revisionist journey to show that accepted accounts of free trade Britain, and certainly not-so-free France, are not as reliable as [End Page 541] previously thought and are, indeed, downright unreliable accounts of what was happening once somebody equipped with the appropriate data, questions and determination to excavate the truth is let loose on the data.

Having established the central thesis of the book, Nye sets himself the task of providing an overview of late seventeenth-to mid nineteenth century British commercial history. In this, Nye establishes key themes to which he regularly returns: revenue requirements within the domestic context, restrictions on trade, and ultimately foreign policy. In particular, he focuses on the commercial relations between Britain and France, but also explores the impact Anglo–French rivalry had on trade with Portugal and Spain.

However, it was not only international producers that the tariffs on French trade benefited. British brewers are also seen to benefit from the British state's imposition of tariffs on French wines. This quickly takes the book into a consideration of interest groups within the state and their impact on government policy, including the direction of the tax burden. Ultimately, the book has ambitions to contribute to a re-evaluation of broad generalizations about British economic power and the political power thereby derived.

The book has two titles, the above-the-line, promotional hook, "War, Wine, and Taxes," and the below-the-line bedrock of "The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689–1900." Both deserve consideration in their own right.

The core substance of the book is a clear, well-argued, methodically executed and explained attempt to rewrite assumptions about the realities rather than the rhetoric of British trade policy and the notion of free trade. There is always something exhilarating about an argument, especially when it is well presented, that says, "hang on a moment a lot of eminent people and historical works have made huge assumptions that underpin sweeping generalisations that some attention to the facts does not support." It is heady stuff, and it has to be said the work makes a very convincing case for abandoning complacent, conventional assumptions.

Likewise, the core contribution of the book succeeds very well in raising questions regarding the state, conceptualizations of the state, and ultimately the role of the state. In this, the book introduces the role of interest groups with the state, such as the brewing interest, to explore the source of policy and ultimately the direction and extent of the tax burden. The book provides counter factual analysis of the impact of trade distortion and the "what ifs" of this slice of history.

The promotional title is very promising and certainly emerges throughout the book to give the arguments thematic glue. The trade statistics of the core contribution provide a solid background to an [End Page 542] interpretation that effectively asks the question implicitly and also explicitly, what if other policies had been pursued where would consumption of French wine rather than British beer and Iberian wines have taken us? In this there are intriguing questions about the emergence of cultural preference. As Nye notes with regard to the cultural belief that "the British drink beer and the French drink wine" in fact "economics and politics had more to do with shaping these 'tastes' than any cultural preference" (44). However, the war, wine, and taxes script gets a little lost, particularly...

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