Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (review)

In an understandable desire to appeal to the widest possible market, historians often deliberately try to catch the temper of the times in their published work. Frank Trentmann's book, which despite the grand sounding title is quite narrowly focused on the contest over free trade in Britain just before and after the First World War, exemplifies the benefits and pitfalls of such a canny approach. Written with some verve, Trentmann manages to breathe new life into the heated contest between free traders and protectionists that structured public debate in the early twentieth century. He also successfully demonstrates how economic questions were bound together with other areas of social and political life and why they generated such passion among various constituencies. Published just as the present economic crisis got into full stride, however, the book's defense of the moral underpinnings of the capitalist market now seems rather lame within the context of justified and widespread anger against predatory speculators and overpaid bankers. If all history is contemporary history, Free Trade Nation might be read as a product of the most recent phase of hubristic neoliberalism, its perspective therefore somewhat out of date before the paperback edition appeared in the bookstores.

The argument is appealingly simple. According to Trentmann, what he refers to as "Free Trade culture" was not merely an economic theory confined largely to elites but in fact constituted a way of life for the majority of citizens (13); thus, it shaped popular politics in profound ways between the late nineteenth century and the eventual introduction of imperial preference after the Ottawa Conference in 1932. Trentmann reconstructs the extensive debate provoked by the spread of protectionist ideas in meticulous detail as a host of organizations rallied to defend the free trade cause following Joseph Chamberlain's declaration of war in 1903; not only liberal and conservative supporters and the Cobden Club but also working-class associations such as the Women's Co-operative Guild were prominent. Coordinated by the Free Trade Union, the battle was fought by means of pamphlets, open-air lectures, mass meetings, and even free trade shops. A wide range of forms, including color posters and magic lantern shows, were employed in an effort to mould popular conceptions of past and present, and some of the best parts of the book explore these forms. By such means, Edwardian free traders addressed and constructed the "citizen-consumer" (2), a new category, Trentmann argues: "The achievement of Free Trade was to invent a much more generalised language of the consumer as a public, national interest" (70). This all unraveled, however, under the strain of war and in its aftermath when consumers became more and more divided against one another. The Conservative party under Stanley Baldwin managed to address consumers' interests most effectively in the 1920s. According to Trentmann, "Conservatives took the civic consumer from its liberal parents and gave it a Conservative pedigree" by means of bodies like the Women's Unionist Organisation that promoted an imperial consumerism (229). New internationalist thinkers such as Alfred Zimmern, who believed that the future lay with international coordination and controls, also helped take the ground from under free trade culture, which had been dead a long time before its formal burial in the early thirties.

Much of this is very well done if not entirely new. Based on exhaustive research, as a study of the political campaign to maintain free trade in early-twentieth-century Britain it is unlikely to be surpassed. Though there is biographical and narrative padding in places, overall the work also manages at times to bring abstract economic ideas to life quite effectively, itself no mean feat. However, there are a number of major flaws. For a start, there is no discussion of the earlier history of free trade, and this is debilitating. The notion that the Edwardian defense of free trade invented a generalized language...