Between Global Commerce and Empire furthers the arguments of my first book, Colonial Capitalism and the Dilemmas of Liberalism. At the heart of both books is the contradictory and constitutive relationship between capitalism, liberalism, and empire in British international thought. While Colonial Capitalism examines this contradiction in liberal defenses of empire, Between Global Commerce and Empire investigates the same contradiction in works of liberal anti-imperial criticism.
The book examines critiques of European expansionism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century liberal international thought through the lens of colonial capitalism. I contend that the much-vaunted anti-imperialism of the period reached its limits when trying – and failing – to sustain a liberal conception of commerce and capital in the context of empire. Classical political economists welcomed the globalisation of commercial relations and the modern European civilisation that they arguably enabled, but they abhorred the violence and injustice of colonialism that made global commerce a historical reality. Their dilemma, in the pithy formulation of J. G. A. Pocock, was that of “introducing commerce where it has not previously existed by means which are archaic and destructive when judged by its own standards.”
The book traces attempts to surmount this contradiction in the works of several political economists in the British Empire who railed against the destruction and iniquities of colonial mercantilism. Liberal denunciations of “empire” (colonial conquest, slavery, and monopoly) often contrasted it with the peaceful and cosmopolitan alternative of “global commerce.” However, imagining global commerce as empire’s benign alternative and the herald of a peaceful and prosperous system of interdependence proved to be a difficult task. A liberal conception of global commerce required uncoupling the normative ideal of commerce from actually existing commerce that had always been steeped in imperial violence. The historical co-constitution of commerce and empire frustrated the intellectual efforts by British liberal international theorists to conjure up a world of commerce without empire.
I demonstrate these tensions in the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume, and John Crawfurd, three Scottish political economists united by their inveterate criticism of mercantilism and their advocacy of free trade and free labor. I show that the liberal anti-imperialism of each figure reached its limits when the imperial constitution of commerce broke the surface, prompting omissions, elisions, and rhetorical devices that offered theoretical closure. The analysis reconstructs Smith’s portrayal of North American settler colonies in the image of ancient Greek colonies of “occupation without conquest”; Hume’s almost complete silence on colonial slavery despite his voluble treatment of ancient slavery, feudal bondage, and Asiatic despotism; and Crawfurd’s account for the deindustrialisation of India and opium exports to China as natural functions of commercial intercourse. As commercial and imperial principles intermeshed around the dispossessive logic of private property, the commercial incivility of slavery, and the imperialism of free trade, separating the two became imperative to uphold global commerce as the peaceful and universally beneficial contender to empire.
This book both builds on and diverges from the influential reappraisals that have credited several liberal thinkers in international political theory with a precocious anti-imperialist sensibility. Parting ways with the focus on the “moral ambivalence” of individual thinkers, the prism of colonial capitalism instead focalizes an institutional-ideological problem, namely, the problem of colonial capitalism for liberal political economy, which exceeds the framework of moral commitments. That the same illiberalism of capitalism vexed the liberal defenders and the liberal critics of empire suggests that the problem existed independently of personal sensibilities and thereby cannot be captured by textual modes of analysis alone. As a result, an adequate analysis of liberalism’s relationship to empire and more broadly of international political thought calls for tools of social theory and social history.