ABSTRACT

A belief that Britain’s chief trading partners were ‘returning’ to protection in the late nineteenth century, after some mid-Victorian tendency towards trade liberalization,1 played its part in conditioning the two Edwardian challenges to fiscal orthodoxy-Balfour’s argument for retaliation, as advocated in his famous pamphlet of September 1903, and Chamberlain’s scheme of imperial preference, sketched in outline in his Glasgow speech in October.