ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the centre of the fair trade challenge to free trade in later Victorian Britain lay an alternative vision whose essence was an imperial Zollverein, whereby trade within the British Empire would be consolidated, allowing the strengthening of the British imperial state. The extent of tariff-making in the empire by the 1880s set clear limits to the potential success of any scheme for imperial economic unity. On the one hand, for free traders, any scheme which reopened the possibility of imperial preference, as did all the schemes of the fair traders, was anathema. On the other hand, the idea of free trade within the empire was one which offered the possibility of harmonizing free trade and imperial sentiment. Unlike the self-governing colonies, India lacked tariff autonomy, so that pressure from Lancashire, uniting employers and working men, was successful both in the 1870s and 1890s in enforcing the abolition of the protective element in such duties.
