Political discourse in Brexit Britain has seen an unexpected return to the language, ideas, and idioms of the 1840s when Britain first defined itself as the “free trade nation.” In campaigning for Brexit, self-styled “free trade economists” sought to return to the unilateral trade policy of “global Britain” first adopted in 1846, but in practice, the British government has sought to negotiate a range of “free trade agreements”; similarly, in Brexit demonology, one overriding goal of leaving the European Union was to escape from its Common Agricultural Policy, the direct lineal descendant of the notorious Corn Laws repealed in 1846. More globally, at variance with the free trade rhetoric in contemporary British politics, the direction of trade policy under American influence after 2016 raised the prospect of trade wars, tariff hikes, and protectionist barriers to the free trade policies which had constituted the common economic aspiration of the world trading system since the Second World War. This recent revival of global public debate over “free trade” comes at the end of a period when discussion of trade policy remained an arcane subject, largely left to economists, international institutions such as GATT or the EU, or debated at best in specialist bodies such as the Institute of Economic Affairs or Chatham House, and rarely creating headlines beyond the pages of The Economist or Financial Times. That retreat was in large part a reflection of the emergence of managed economy in which decisions over economic policy were increasingly determined by the state and the experts. Later, paradoxically, the tide of neo-liberalism with its deregulatory fervor and restoration of “free markets” globally as well as the reshaping of the architecture of world trade with the creation of the WTO in 1995, produced, if anything, a marked popular backlash against free trade, no longer identified with consumer democracy and popular welfare but the ability of TNCs to exploit cheap labor worldwide and to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich, reversing decades of growing income equality.

Against this far wider canvas, this essay sets out to understand the part free trade has played in British politics from the publication of Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) to the referendum decision in favor of Brexit in 2016.