Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-Trade Conspiracy?

Palen, Marc‐William

doi:10.1093/dh/dht003

Cited by 24 publications

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“…[40] The U.S., still in the period after the Civil War, continued to be very protectionist. [41] [42] 5 See also…”

Section: Global Protectionismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Panic of 1873

2010

Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History

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The Panic of 1873 was a financial crisis that triggered a depression in Europe and North America that lasted from 1873 until 1879, and even longer in some countries. In Britain, for example, it started two decades of stagnation known as the "Long Depression" that weakened the country's economic leadership. [1] The Panic was known as the "Great Depression" until the events in the early 1930s took precedence. [2] The Panic of 1873 and the subsequent depression had several underlying causes, of which economic historians debate the relative importance. Postwar inflation, rampant speculative investments (overwhelmingly in railroads), a large trade deficit, ripples from economic dislocation in Europe resulting from the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), property losses in the Chicago (1871) and Boston (1872) fires, and other factors put a massive strain on bank reserves, which plummeted in New York City

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“…[40] The U.S., still in the period after the Civil War, continued to be very protectionist. [41] [42] 5 See also…”

Section: Global Protectionismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Panic of 1873

2010

Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History

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“…Second is the common tendency to halt studies of transatlantic abolitionism in (Slap 2006;Palen 2013Palen , 2014bPalen , and 2015. The reformists' laissez-faire faith would correspondingly shift from freeing men to liberalizing American trade.…”

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“…Long after Cobden’s 1865 death, many of these American radicals would maintain correspondence with Britain’s Cobdenite leadership, and would continue to work toward bringing about Cobden’s universal vision of free trade and peace. These American friends of Cobden and Bright, these American subscribers to Cobdenism, headed the vanguard of Victorian America’s abolitionist and free-trade movements (Palen 2013 and forthcoming). Again, this is not to suggest that all abolitionists were Cobdenites.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…21 The previously missed mid-century American influx of Victorian free-trade ideology—Cobdenism—was intimately tied to the antebellum transatlantic abolitionist movement, followed soon thereafter by the controversial politico-ideological struggle over American trade policy after the Civil War. For them, at least, it was but the next logical step in seeking the emancipation of mankind (Palen 2013 and forthcoming).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Many of these antebellum abolitionist free traders would become the postbellum reformist leaders of the Liberal Republican and Mugwump movements. With the slaves ostensibly freed, these laissez-faire reformers would come to view the federal occupation of the New South with abhorrence, a counterproductive and even immoral abuse of government power, much as they would come to view with disgust the mainstream postbellum Republican adherence to protectionism (Slap 2006; Palen 2013, 2014b, and 2015). The reformists’ laissez-faire faith would correspondingly shift from freeing men to liberalizing American trade.…”

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Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography

Palen

2015

J Hist Econ Thought

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This essay seeks to trace the many-and often conflicting-economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse. In particular, it explores the contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism, and highlights the understudied influence of Victorian free-trade ideology within the American abolitionist movement. By bringing together historiographical controversies from the American and British side, the essay calls into question long-standing conceptions regarding the relationship between free trade and abolitionism, and suggests new avenues for research.Contradictions continue to surround the historical intersection of Anglo-American capitalism and slavery. The contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism sits high among them. This historiographical essay seeks to ideas. For example, while granting that antebellum abolitionists "generally adhered to free trade economic ideas, sometimes radically so," James L. Huston has argued that "abolitionists possessed a biblical political economy, not a classical liberal one," a moral impulse that became diluted from the 1830s to the 1850s (2000, p. 488; 1990, p. 614). 2Paul Goodman has similarly portrayed American abolitionism as an oppositional religious response to the era's relatively unregulated capitalist marketplace: "Abolition was a struggle to impose on social and economic relations the moral principles that were rooted in Christian teachings" (1998, pp. xiv, 140). The typical evangelical historiographical tradition goes even further than these interpretations in suggesting that 1 For the wide variation in interpretations, see also Huston (2000 and 1990).2 K. R. M. Short, examining the English intersection of Christianity and antislavery, has drawn similar conclusions; British free trade was "firmly wed to anti-slavery," and contained "a decidedly religious imprimatur" (1965-66, p. 313). 3American abolitionists were Christian reformers whose evangelical morality was in inherent opposition to market capitalism. Barnes (1933, pp. 3-16), andRandall (1940). 4 See, for instance, Ashworth (1995, pp. 131-181), Davis (1987), Davis (1975, pp. 45-47), Temperley (1980. 5 See also Ashworth (1987). This interpretation bears some similarity to that of Seymour Drescher concerning the British marketplace. Although granting laissez-faire capitalism and abolitionism were 4 predominantly middle-class abolitionists in the United States subscribed to an economic individualism and anti-institutionalism that at times bordered upon anarchism (Perry 1973; Elkins 1958, pp. 147-157; Forster 2014 England, but also suggested that declining profits from the transatlantic slave system, not humanitarianism, brought about the end of the British slave trade and Caribbean slavery in the early nineteenth century. This humanitarianism-in-decline motif remains a point of closely connected, Drescher has contended that the market per se did not create the abolitionist humanitarian impulse; working-class soci...

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Election of 1876/Compromise of 1877

Palen¹

2014

A Companion to the Reconstruction Presidents 1865–1881

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Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-Trade Conspiracy?

Cited by 24 publications

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Panic of 1873

Panic of 1873

Free-Trade Ideology and Transatlantic Abolitionism: A Historiography

Election of 1876/Compromise of 1877

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