ABSTRACT
Manchester's disciples believed that paradise was an international bazaar. They favored the international flow of goods and ideas and the creation of institutions that channeled that flow and the abolition of institutions that blocked it. The long peace that followed the Battle of Waterloo was increasingly explained as the result of the international flow of commodities and ideas. The Crystal Palace was perhaps the world's first peace festival. Henry Thomas Buckle was one of many influential prophets of the idea that telegraphs and railways and steamships were powerfully promoting peace. One of Buckle's themes was the decline of the warlike spirit in Western Europe. Buckle argued that the new commercial spirit was making nations depend on one another whereas the old spirit had made them fight one another. Just as commerce now linked nations, so the steamship and railway linked peoples: 'the greater the contact', argued Buckle, 'the greater the respect'.
