Trade Wars and Global Order Since 1800

The ‘trade war’ is one of the most potent and - it would seem - persistent metaphors of modern international politics. Its meaning and history, however, have rarely been systematically investigated. Occupying an awkward gray zone between ‘harder’ forms of economic coercion like sanctions and blockades on the one hand, and ordinary variations of tax and regulatory policy on the other, trade wars are difficult to strictly define. In the social science literature, they are discussed - as in a classic 1985 article by the political scientist John Conybeare - as efforts by ‘states’ to secure ‘economic objectives directly related to the traded-goods sector of the economy’ through ‘restrictions on the flow of goods and services’.

For historians, however, these kinds of definitions raise more questions than answers. What do ‘trade wars’ look like if we abandon the largely specious analytical framework of an international ‘system’ populated exclusively by sovereign and equal nation-states, and take historically generated inequalities of power, wealth and prestige seriously? How did historical actors come to understand what their ‘economic objectives’ were? How were these objectives linked to broader political and cultural concerns and identities? How was knowledge about international trade generated, and how was it placed in the service of economic power-projection?

Instead of taking the parameters of ‘trade wars’ as givens, the papers gathered in this session interrogate how this emotive metaphor came to be part of the language of global politics, and test its conceptual and geographical limits. They address a set of closely interrelated themes: hierarchy and power in global politics, discourses of equality, discrimination and status, and the material and technological dimensions of historic and contemporary economic rivalries. Bringing together business, legal and international history from the 1820s to the present day, this session initiates an urgently needed conversation about where ‘trade wars’ came from, how they have been waged - and how they have been defused, or pursued by other means.