American “free-produce” advocates insisted that purchasers of goods made from slave cotton shared fully in the enslaver’s criminality. In fact, they emphasized that this crime-tainted cotton, moving from field to fabric, damned every commercial agent along the transatlantic chain connecting the enslaver to the consumer. The first half of the chapter examines these advocates’ vision of market complicity and their conviction that slave cotton remained morally toxic across its market life. The second half focuses on the rejection of this vision by William Lloyd Garrison, once a supporter of the Free Produce movement. Garrison came to view cotton abstinence as impracticable and marginal to the work of abolition. Remarkably, he argued that free markets and commercial transactions scrubbed slave cotton of moral contamination. Because they were commodities, slave-cotton goods were morally benign and thus “perfectly innocent” to consume.

Chapter 1 revisits Goethe’s endorsement of a “free trade of sentiments and ideas” in the light of the free trade discourses of his age. First, I dissect these discourses’ complexity and doctrinal incoherence in eighteenth-nineteenth-century British, French, and German political economy. Then I explore the ambivalences in Goethe’s vague suggestion about a free trade world literature by addressing his peculiar attitude to commerce, his reminiscences of the administrative economics of Cameralism based on the heritage of the self-sustaining Aristotelian household, his aversions to modern finance, and his nostalgia for the medieval trade fair. Based on these decidedly antiquated considerations informing his understanding of the mediums, sites, and agents of commercial and intellectual exchange, I suggest that as opposed to Marx’s approach to world literature as an offspring of modern industrial capitalism, Goethe’s views were bound up with pre-modern merchant capitalism.

Between 1500 and 1700, the right of groups and nations to trade were conceptualised and even enacted through a range of legal claims and practices. It is nevertheless possible and useful to make some generalisations about the rise and fall of the military, economic, political, religious and legal powers of various states and their conceptualisations of the right to trade. The primary texts bring out two salient distinctions, concerning the collective right to trade. Some commentators argued that the right to trade was limitable, while others considered it non-derogable. Another group of texts grounded the right to trade primarily in divine law, while others emphasised natural, international or municipal law.

Africa and Europe have had an economic partnership for decades, first around the notion of friendship, then, since the 2000s, around the idea of solidarity. Despite this moral rhetoric, Europe is sanctuarizing itself, cultivating an anti-migratory fantasy and working for a resolute control of African migration. This policy is formalized with the “readmission clause,” whereby certain African immigrants are being posed as unassimilable, undesirable and disposable because they are useless for the neoliberal productive order. Therefore, any flight from exploitation on the continent must be blocked. As this perspective has led to extensive violations and aroused criticism and opposition, this chapter proposes, no longer a hybrid ideology but care. By means of a reading of the history of ideas, we insist on the impasse of the perspective that rejects migration in the name of autochthony. We propose a utopia: to work for the access of all peoples to the general cycle of industrial civilizations; this will bring equality between peoples who will negotiate migrations, taking into account concrete forms of solidarity.

For Alden Young and Tinashe Nyamunda, development as a right did no more to further decolonization processes. Rather, development served as a “common language through which both the former colonizers and the ascendant nationalist elites could speak to one another,” setting the stage for “an imperialism of free trade” rather than promoting the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. If decolonization processes remain incomplete as many contributors to this section suggest, so too do aspirational processes of political and economic freedom expressed in the language of rights as racial equality, self-determination, and economic sovereignty.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of trade and globalization in Europe, focusing on the forces that have shaped trade patterns over time. It explores the impact of technological advancements, such as improvements in transportation and communication, as well as the influence of political decisions on trade policy, including cycles of protectionism and free trade. The chapter also discusses the economic benefits and challenges of globalization, analysing how trade has contributed to economic growth while also creating winners and losers within and between countries. The chapter argues that while globalization has generally increased economic efficiency, its effects have been unevenly distributed.

The fragmentation of the European art market after the First World War resulted not only from the war itself but also from deliberate legislative choices. Post-1918 legislation was enacted in a climate of emergency, influenced by the imperative to generate fiscal revenue and protect art. Paris’s decline as an art hub was exacerbated by well-meaning but ill-conceived export and tax regulations, hindering its ability to regain pre-war prominence. Fears of economic and political seizure influenced Weimar policymakers, worsening German isolation. In contrast, Britain opted for minimal postwar intervention. These legislative approaches reflected different economic trajectories as much as they did postwar mentalities. The state’s attempt to protect art, extract profit from it, and avoid economic and cultural expropriation was a symptom of postwar nationalisation. It dealt the final blow to an already weakened European auction system.

The authors – Iranian lawyers working in international trade law – examine the rule-of-law effects of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which limited Iran’s enrichment activities and implemented enhanced monitoring of its nuclear program in exchange for relief from all UN and European Union nuclear-related sanctions. From January 16, 2016, financial transactions and a range of associated service sectors in Iran were opened up for international trade. These included banking and insurance; oil, gas, and the petrochemical sector; shipping and transport sectors; metals; and software. At the same time, restrictions on the transfer of sensitive goods and ballistic missiles, as well as measures against certain entities, remained in force. The US withdrawal from the agreement in 2018 has led to increased trade between Iran China, and, overall, has reversed the Iranian state’s forced withdrawal from certain branches of the economy, thereby resolidifying both its political and economic power.

In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

The conclusion summarises the answers to the book’s four animating questions: How did modern slavery emerge on the global political agenda? Where do key actors in the global antislavery network draw the boundary between free and unfree labour? How does the multifaceted approach to modern slavery keep the different legal domains to which unfree labour is assigned from clashing? How do attempts to govern transnational forms of unfree labour reconfigure sovereignty? It argues that modern slavery laws attempt to mediate the escalating tensions around borders and markets created by neoliberal capitalism’s reliance on managed migration and free trade as engines of accumulation. Probing the social relations that propelled transnational modern slavery law, it reveals that the border between free and unfree labour is a contested and gendered act of governance operating across different scales. It concludes by considering the vexed question: what makes labour ‘free’?

The problems that afflict Pareto efficiency can be overcome if the criterion is rebuilt on preference-free foundations. A policy change passes the ‘availability test’ if it allows agents to afford whatever they purchased originally: Agents might not then be better off but no one can legitimately object to the change. One way to pass the availability test is to give agents the right to repeat their original transactions; a reform of rent control serves as an example. A second strategy stabilizes prices for consumers while letting the prices that firms face promote efficiency in production. A deregulation of a public utility, for example, can preserve consumer prices while giving firms an incentive to innovate. These policy alternatives show how to resolve the Schumpeterian dilemma of creative destruction: They harness the progressive feature of capitalism, that it fosters technological change, while protecting the individuals who can be harmed by the same forces. Conventional laissez-faire policies are in contrast difficult to justify even from within the orbit of traditional economic theory and can generate bitter social conflict. An application to opening an economy to free trade shows how to combine the advantages of technological change while satisfying the availability test.

This chapter argues that if anti-sweatshop activists want to help workers they should specifically target and boycott slave labor sweatshops such as those in China with forced Uyghur labor; advocate and monitor “ethical branding”; buy goods made in the Third World; pay children to go to school to reduce child labor; promote the process of development; and advocate for relaxing immigration restrictions.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the contemporary political debates surrounding globalisation. It illustrates the main features of protests against the social consequences of a globalised economy, and it identifies some of the key political issues that scholars and students of International Relations must face when addressing the promotion of justice and effective governance within a more densely connected world.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brought to greater prominence a question that has long vexed Australian foreign policy-makers: could they avoid choosing between the US security alliance and Australia’s complementary economic ties with China? Given the immense political capital invested in the BRI by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it was perhaps inevitable that Australia – like many other countries – had to declare its position. By so doing, however, Australia was forced to reckon with an issue that pitted its security interests directly against its economic ones. This chapter traces Australia’s evolving position on the BRI from 2016 to 2020, its interrelated justifications for rejecting the BRI, and the political and economic consequences of the decision. We show that debate over the BRI disrupted a longstanding consensus about the centrality of free trade and investment to Australian foreign economic policy. The BRI, we argue, signified a turning away from Australia’s previously enthusiastic support for global free trade to a more qualified security-sensitive approach.

The creation of a new order of security in the Mediterranean revolved around shared conceptions of threat and a common apparatus of cooperative repressive practices. This conclusion explains how the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, which European contemporaries perceived as one of the most urgent and persistent threats to security, was used to bring significant changes to the traditional diplomatic and maritime practices of the Mediterranean region. In fact, the fight against this imputed piratical threat fostered new ideas of the Mediterranean as a regional whole that could be rendered secure through policing efforts and imperial interventions. As a result, the political appearance of the Mediterranean Sea and its shorelines changed profoundly between 1815 and the closing years of the 1850s, when the Mediterranean seemed perfectly secure from piratical threats.

This chapter addresses the question: How did the term become familiar in society? Even the earliest uses demonstrate the integration of knowledge classification and engagement with large audiences. Derived from German usage, the term ‘applied sciences’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was key to underpinning a major new encyclopaedia project intended to structure knowledge and thinking. A succession of loyal editors realised his vision as the massive Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, advertised using Coleridge’s coinage. It would also be taken up by King’s College London seeking to describe its course teaching knowledge underlying engineering without claiming to be technical training. Meanwhile, the chemist J. F. W. Johnston used the term to promote the services he offered farmers. During and after debates over Corn Law Repeal, the press discussed Johnston’s applied science as a potential saviour of agriculture. The term’s use then snowballed.