Peter T. Marsh

Now here's an oddity. This is an economic and political history of the negotiations on trade tariffs between Britain and other European states in the second half of the nineteenth century. That sounds a pretty dry subject, and in one way it is. This is a warts 'n' all account of those negotiations, though to the author's credit it doesn't become boring or difficult to read, only tedious. Because despite the high points of politics that we see with 20/20 hindsight, in reality day-to-day politics is the boring but important stuff. And that's the subject matter of this book.

The setting and the story is more interesting. In 1860, the major divide in politics was between those who wanted Free Trade and those who wanted to use tariffs on imported goods to protect home industries. The story is more pertinent because in 1860, international trade was in its infancy. Britain had been the first nation to industrialise, and the first to build a major transport system that could get goods to new markets, first at home and then overseas. In 1860, Richard Cobden, a noted advocate of free trade as a route to peace and prosperity between nations, and a prominent member of the Anti-Corn Law League twenty years previously, went to France and negotiated a trade treaty that set the pattern for trading arrangements for the rest of the century. Over time, this evolved into a sort of "Common Market" as different countries negotiated similar treaties between themselves, meaning as a consequence that goods imported into one country on favourable terms could then be re-exported to a second country under the favourable terms negotiated between those two countries. This system worked well until it fell apart in 1892 under protectionist pressure from various states, whilst political pressures within the then Conservative government in Britain caused inaction on our part to do anything to save the situation.

It was interesting to see contemporary political events through the prism of day-to-day politics; for example, the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was to force France to allow "most favoured nation" tariff terms to Prussia, which then influenced the development of trading across Europe from that point onwards. The situation also changed as the various European nations in turn industrialised and built trans-national railway systems, facilitating the easier movement of goods.

The book also draws parallels between Britain's attitude to Europe in the nineteenth and late twentieth centuries, and seeing as the book was written by an American academic, it has the benefit of detachment. Just as in the post-war era Britain set the framework for what was to become the European Union but then declined to join, thus allowing the members to set and revise terms favourable to themselves which later British politicians found problematical, so in the previous century Britain encouraged the establishment of a network of interlocking trade treaties but then took no leadership role to preserve and develop those treaties. The author also identifies Britain's unwillingness to identify potential trading rivals both in the nineteenth century (Germany) and in the twentieth (post-war Germany and the Far East), and the misguided belief that if trading in one market became difficult, Britain could always turn to the Empire (or the Commonwealth), not realising that in a changed, internationalist world, those countries were free to make their own trading relationships without reference to "the mother country". Finally, the author identifies a failure by the British, then as now, to adopt the language and message of their negotiations and discussions to the European audience. As with Gladstone, so with Cameron; and our inability to communicate properly resulted then, and results now, in our marginalisation, which we mistake for independence.… (plus d'informations)