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ADAM SMITH AS ADVOCATE OF EMPIRE, c. 1870–1932*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

MARC-WILLIAM PALEN
MARC-WILLIAM PALEN*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Exeter and US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
*
History Department, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ[email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines how The wealth of nations (1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions of The wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 179 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Anthony Howe, Duncan Bell, and the journal's anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions, to International Security Studies, Yale University, for its support, and to the 2013 British Scholar Conference attendees for their feedback.

References

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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.

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63 Nicholson, J. Shield, A project of empire: a critical study of the economics of imperialism, with special reference to the ideas of Adam Smith (London, 1909), pp. x–xiGoogle Scholar. For criticism of Nicholson's nationalist-imperialist interpretation, see especially Knorr, British colonial theories, pp. 187–94.

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.

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