Marx and Manchester: The Evolution of the Socialist Internationalist Free-Trade Tradition, c.1846-1946

Abstract

Socialism is commonly assumed to be antithetical to free trade. This article challenges this misconception by exploring the widespread socialist internationalist support for free trade across the century before the Cold War. The socialist internationalist free-trade tradition evolved alongside and drew inspiration from the Manchester School of economic liberalism. As with any intellectual tradition, socialist internationalist support for free trade was not static. Turn-of-the-century Marxist theorists of imperialism reformulated Marx and Engels’s mid-nineteenth-century free-trade endorsement. Socialist internationalists thereafter increasingly advocated for free trade as a necessary precondition for a more peaceful world order: an ideological marriage that the Manchester School had so famously wedded together in the 1840s.