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² Howe, Anthony, ‘From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana: free trade, empire, and globalisation, 1846–1946’, Bulletin of Asia-Pacific Studies, 13 (2003), pp. 137–59Google Scholar.

³ University of Edinburgh Professor J. Shield Nicholson's Smithian imperial advocacy notably stands out in the historiography, as I will discuss in greater detail in Section iii. For the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ and the imperial federation movement, see especially Bell, Duncan, The idea of Greater Britain: empire and the future of world order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bell, Duncan, ed., Victorian visions of global order: empire and international relations in nineteenth-century political thought (Cambridge, 2008)Google Scholar; Bell, Duncan, ‘From ancient to modern in Victorian imperial thought’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 735–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, E. H. H., ‘The political economy of empire, 1880–1914’, in Porter, Andrew, ed., Oxford history of the British empire: the nineteenth century (5 vols., New York, NY, 2001), iii, pp. 346–71Google Scholar; Gaston, Jack, ‘The free trade diplomacy debate and the Victorian European common market initiative’, Canadian Journal of History, 22 (1987), pp. 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tyler, J. E., The struggle for imperial unity, 1868–1895 (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Reese, Trevor R., The history of the Royal Commonwealth Society, 1868–1968 (London, 1968), pp. 64–79Google Scholar; Kendle, J. E., Federal Britain (London and New York, NY, 1997), ch. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kendle, J. E., The colonial and imperial conferences, 1887–1911 (London, 1967)Google Scholar; and Martin, Ged, ‘The idea of imperial federation’, in Hyam, Ronald and Martin, Ged, eds., Reappraisals in British imperial history (London, 1975), pp. 121–39Google Scholar. Martin also traces these ideas of imperial federalism back to the 1820s and briefly notes that ‘Empire federalists’ cited Smith ‘as a rival authority’, in ‘Empire federalism and imperial parliamentary union, 1820–1870’, Historical Journal, 16 (973), pp. 76, 80. Alternatively, Kendle begins his study in the 1600s in Federal Britain. For imperial federation, race, and the non-white British empire, see also Koditschek, Theodore, Liberalism, imperialism, and the historical imagination: nineteenth-century visions of a Greater Britain (Cambridge, 2011)Google Scholar. For a good summary of the federative schemes from the 1850s to 1930s, see Cheng, Seymour Ching-Yuan, Schemes for the federation of the British empire (New York, NY, 1931)Google Scholar.

⁴ For recent studies on imperial networks and the British world, see, inter al., Magee, Gary B. and Thompson, Andrew S., Empire and globalisation: networks of people, goods and capital in the British world, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, The British world: culture, diaspora and identity (London, 2003)Google Scholar; and Buckner, Philip and Francis, R. Douglas, eds., Rediscovering the British world (Calgary, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁵ Brown, Benjamin H., The Tariff Reform movement in Great Britain, 1881–1895 (New York, NY, 1943)Google Scholar; Palen, Marc-William, ‘Protection, federation and union: the global impact of the McKinley tariff upon the British empire, 1890–1894’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38 (2010), pp. 395–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trentmann, Frank, ‘The transformation of fiscal reform: reciprocity, modernization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early twentieth-century Britain’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 1005–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rogers, Edmund, ‘The United States and the fiscal debate in Britain, 1873–1913’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), pp. 593–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Marc-William Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade: Anglo-American relations and the ideological origins of American globalization, 1846–1896’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2011); Palen, Marc-William, ‘Foreign relations in the Gilded Age: a British free trade conspiracy?’, Diplomatic History, 37 (2013), pp. 217–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howe, Anthony, Free trade and liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), p. 267Google Scholar.

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⁸ For studies of the connection between imperialism and technological advancements, see Lewis Pyenson, ‘Science and imperialism’, in Olby, Robert Cecil and Cantor, Geoffrey N., eds., Companion to the history of modern science (London and New York, NY, 1990)Google Scholar; Boyce, Robert W. D., ‘Imperial dreams and national realities: Britain, Canada, and the struggle for a Pacific telegraph cable, 1879–1902’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), pp. 39–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, The tools of empire (New York, NY, 1981)Google Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, The tentacles of progress: technology transfer in the age of imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Headrick, Daniel, The invisible weapon: telecommunications and international politics, 1851–1945 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; and Drayton, Richard, ‘Science and the European empires’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 23 (1995), pp. 503–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁰ Knorr called Smith's theories on colonies ‘the most revolutionary advance in the evolution of British thought’ in his analysis of the subject. See Knorr, Klaus E., British colonial theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1963; orig. edn, 1944), pp. 175–95Google Scholar. Other good summaries of Adam Smith and imperialism can be found, among others, in Muthu, Sankar, Enlightenment against empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003)Google Scholar; Pitts, Jennifer, A turn to empire: the rise of imperial liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation state in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar; Skinner, Andrew S., ‘Adam Smith and the American economic community an essay in applied economics’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 37 (1976), pp. 59–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winch, Donald, Riches and poverty: an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar; Winch, Donald, Classical political economy and colonies (Cambridge, MA, 1965)Google Scholar; and Winch, Donald, Adam Smith's politics: an essay in historiographic revision (Cambridge, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ I should note that the analysis and examples included herein are by no means exhaustive, but illustrative of the turn-of-the-century usage of Adam Smith's advocacy of imperial federation.

¹² Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, p. 66.

¹³ Winch, Smith's politics, p. 148.

¹⁴ Benians, E. A., ‘Adam Smith's project of an empire’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 1 (1925), p. 283CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For such imperial interest, see Reese, History of Royal Commonwealth Society, ch. 1; and Beasley, Edward, Empire as the triumph of theory: imperialism, information, and the Colonial Society of 1868 (London and New York, NY, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For studies of Smith's general legacy, see for instance Fleischacker, Samuel, ‘Adam Smith's reception among the American founders, 1776–1790’, William and Mary Quarterly, 59 (2002), pp. 897–924CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tribe, Keith, ‘The German reception of Adam Smith’, in Tribe, Keith, ed., A critical bibliography of Adam Smith (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Crowley, John E., ‘Neo-mercantilism and The wealth of nations: British commercial policy after the American revolution’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 339–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothschild, Emma, ‘Adam Smith and Conservative economics’, Economic History Review, n.s., 45 (1992), pp. 74–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Teichgraeber, Richard F., ‘“Less abused than I had reason to expect”: the reception of the Wealth of nations in Britain, 1776–1790’, Historical Journal, 30 (1991), pp. 337–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haakonssen, Knud and Winch, Donald, ‘The legacy of Adam Smith’, in Cambridge companion to Adam Smith, ed. Haakonssen, Knud (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Winch, Classical political economy and colonies.

¹⁵ Knorr, British colonial theories, pp. 187–94. Gerard M. Koot points to a more general crisis over Adam Smith's legacy during this period in English historical economics, 1870–1926: the rise of economic history and neomercantilism (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 10–14.

¹⁶ Wagner, Donald O., ‘British economists and the empire II’, Political Science Quarterly, 47 (1932), p. 74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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¹⁹ Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 116–41; Anthony Howe, ‘Cobden club (act. 1866–1982)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography (Oxford, 2005); Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade’; Palen, ‘Foreign relations in the Gilded Age’.

²⁰ Trentmann, Frank, Free trade nation: commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain (Oxford and New York, NY, 2008), p. 2Google Scholar; Trentmann, Frank, ‘Political culture and political economy: interest, ideology and free trade’, Review of International Political Economy, 5 (1998), pp. 217–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a provocative interpretation of imperialism and British socialism during the period covered here, see Claeys, Gregory, Imperial sceptics: British critics of empire, 1850–1920 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Matthew, H. C. G., The liberal imperialists: the ideas and politics of a post-Gladstonian elite (London, 1973)Google Scholar; McKibbin, Ross, The evolution of the Labour party, 1910–1924 (New York, NY, 1974)Google Scholar; and Morris, A. J. A., Edwardian radicalism, 1900–1914: some aspects of British radicalism (Boston, MA, 1974)Google Scholar.

²¹ As Anthony Howe describes, ‘only slowly was the discontent of agrarians, manufacturers, and imperial federationists fused, under the aegis of Britain's historical economists, into the Tariff Reform assault on the body of Cobdenism pronounced dead a decade earlier’ in the 1890s. Howe, Free trade and liberal England, p. 195.

²² Smith, Adam, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (Edinburgh, 1843; orig. edn, 1776), pp. 251, 254Google Scholar.

²³ Smith, Wealth of nations, p. 259.

²⁴ Goldwin Smith was the most outspoken Cobdenite advocate of British decolonization, and was prone to referencing Adam Smith to support his argument. Duncan Bell notes that Goldwin Smith was himself ‘highly selective’ in employing ‘Smithian arguments against the economic viability of the colonial system’. Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, p. 198. For such usage, see for instance Goldwin Smith, The empire (Oxford and London, 1863), pp. xvi–xvii, 21–3, 113.

²⁵ Smith, Wealth of nations, pp. 255, 258.

²⁶ Ibid., p. 258; Guttridge, G. H., ‘Adam Smith on the American Revolution: an unpublished memorial’, American Historical Review, 38 (1933), pp. 714–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Andrew S., ‘Adam Smith and the American Revolution’, Presidential Studies Quarterly, 7 (1977), pp. 75–87Google Scholar.

²⁷ Smith, Wealth of nations, p. 258.

²⁸ For such early references to Adam Smith's scheme of imperial unity, see for instance Australia's Jenkins, John Edward, The colonies and imperial unity, or, the ‘barrel without the hoops’ (London, 1871), p. 28Google Scholar; and Smith, Francis Gould, The Australian protectionist (Melbourne, 1877), p. 7Google Scholar. Jenkins in fact advocated a free trade empire in the hope of stemming the movement toward protectionism among the self-governing colonies of Canada and Victoria. For this early demand for a free trade empire, see also Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 213–22.

²⁹ Brown, Tariff Reform movement; Kendle, John E., The round table movement and imperial union (Toronto and Buffalo, 1975)Google Scholar; Palen, ‘Protection, federation and union’; Palen, ‘The conspiracy of free trade’, ch. 8.

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³² Dilke, Charles, Greater Britain: a record of travel in English-speaking countries (New York, NY, 1869), pp. 206–7Google Scholar. For more on Dilke, see Gwynn, Stephen M. and Tuckwell, Gertrude, Sir Charles W. Dilke (2 vols., London, 1917)Google Scholar; and Nicholls, David, The lost prime minister: a life of Sir Charles Dilke (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

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³⁸ Ibid., pp. 9, 11–12.

³⁹ C. V. Smith, ‘Imperial federation: suggestions as to the mode in which it can be carried into effect’, in Five best essays, pp. 128, 129, 140, 158.

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⁴⁵ Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 214–15, 218. See for example Davidson, John, Commercial federation and colonial trade policy (London, 1900), pp. 14, 75Google Scholar. New Zealand and South Africa thereafter instituted imperial preferential policies in 1903, followed by Australia in 1908.

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⁵⁰ Miller, Some phases, pp. 5, 2, 4. This Cobdenite logic was of course quite in keeping with Smith's proposal for imperial decolonization.

⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 28–9, 22–3. For Deakin's support of Chamberlain, see also La Nauze, J. A., Alfred Deakin: a biography (Melbourne, 1979), pp. 475–514Google Scholar; Howe, Free trade and liberal England, p. 241. Similarly, B. R. Wise, once a strong Australian advocate of free trade, became the spokesman of the Australian Preferential League, a Chamberlain supporter, and even suggested that Cobden was no ‘Little Englander’, but if alive would have supported Chamberlain's reforms. See B. R. Wise, ‘Preferential trade’, 21 Nov. 1903, Sydney, State Library of New South Wales, B. R. Wise papers, 1879–1915, ML MSS 6107, vol. 6, box 2, fo. 12; B. R. Wise, ‘Cobden's imperial policy’, London Times, 28 Dec. 1905; Pall Mall Gazette, 23 Oct. 1905, p. 3; and Howe, Free trade and liberal England, p. 241.

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⁶⁴ F. S. Oliver, ‘Mr. Shield Nicholson's “project of empire”’, London Times, 5 Jan. 1910, p. 5.

⁶⁵ Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 280–1; Wood, British economists, p. 116.

⁶⁶ Trentmann, Free trade nation; Trentmann, ‘The strange death of free trade: the erosion of the “liberal consensus” in Britain, c. 1903–1932’, in Eugenio F. Biagini, ed., Citizenship and community: liberals, radicals, and collective identities in the British isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 219–50; Howe, Free trade and liberal England, ch. 8; Young, Ralph A., ‘British imperial preference and the American tariff’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 141 (1929), pp. 204–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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