ABSTRACT

Latin America in many ways provides a microcosm of the rise and fall of the British free trade project in the nineteenth-century world. The beginnings of a shift towards policies of freer trade in Britain in the 1820s corresponded directly with the onset of independence in the former Ibero-Hispanic empires. As a result, Britain’s relationship with those emerging postcolonial states was based largely on the model of a free market among commercial republics whose potential was held in greater esteem than reliance upon the “uncivilized” nations of the East. Later, when the East and Africa fell under the sway of competing (and largely protectionist) empires in the later nineteenth century, in Latin America, Britain continued to uphold a “fair field and no favor,” although increasingly faced by the commercial power of the United States, often seeking exclusive advantages. At the same time, the Latin American states, building on progress in their primary sectors, sought increasingly to foster domestic manufacturing industries (Platt, 1968, 1972; Albert, 1983; Darwin, 2009, pp.  135-43). After World War I, with British economic paramountcy largely broken, the newly dominant United States herself turned towards the British-style freer trade, with Cordell Hull’s “Good Neighbor” policies in many ways based on his understanding of the British model of the relationship between free trade, interdependence, and peace (Butler, 1998; see chapter by Meardon in this volume). Only after 1945 did this model become largely rejected in Latin America, with the emergence of the Prebisch-CEPAL inspired vision of autonomous, state-directed economic development, although the former’s ideological content in terms of free markets and state intervention, unilateral or reciprocal free trade, dependence or interdependence, remained an ineluctable part of wider contemporary trade debates (Hirschman, 1961).