ABSTRACT
In the last years of the Thirteen Colonies, a strong strand of economic liberalism, deriving in large part from Adam Smith, served as one of the vibrant linkages within Anglo-American culture.1 Even before the Wealth of Nations had been published, Benjamin Franklin had urged that commerce should be 'as free between all the nations of the world, as it is between the several counties of England'.2 Yet over the next century, no policy seemed more to divide Britain from her former subjects than that of free trade. For Britain's progressive adoption of free trade (including the abandonment of the Navigation Acts which many believed had fomented the American revolt), was matched by the new republic's increasing resort to protection, with the erection of a battery of tariffs and discriminatory duties. 3 This contrast proved enduring, for although at times it seemed that the United States might embrace free trade, for the most part, her policy into the 1930s remained one of unremitting protectionism.4 Britain appeared similarly rigid in her attachment to free trade, a loyalty that provided one of the most important and longlasting ideological characteristics of the British Liberal Party.5 However much, therefore, historians have identified the emergence of a common liberalism between the two polities, for example, readily associating American Democrats with admiration for Gladstone, or the Edwardian New Liberals with American Progressives, this mutuality fell short of common adherence to free trade. 6
American hostility to free trade was in turn the source of great anxiety among British Liberals, with Gladstone in 1890 already seeking to direct the United States towards the free trade responsibilities which he held properly belonged to the world's premier economic power.? Protectionism, if not quite sinful in the Gladstonian creed, was a dangerous disease against which he even felt it necessary to warn the grandson of Sir Robert Peel before he embarked for the United States in 1896. Thus, George Peel recalled that he had visited Gladstone, who 'adminstered to me, for some three or four hours altogether, what I
could only regard as a prophylactic, an inoculation, against my contemplated contact with American realities. This took the form of an account . . . of those principles of economic policy which had animated and guided Sir Robert Peel ... and, in turn, himself'. Peel added 'A few weeks later, in remote Nebraska, I was destined to sustain a converse "economic impact" from Mr William Jennings Bryan'.8
