Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain.

• Author: Lusztig, Michael
• Position: Book review

Trentmann, Frank. Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2008. lxv + 450 pages. Cloth, $50.00.

In this detailed and ambitious project, historian Frank Trentmann addresses the puzzle of why free trade lost its status as an icon of a British civil religion between the late Victorian era and the end of the First World War. Focusing largely on consumer attitudes, Trentmann distances himself from the more traditional pursuit of political economists--explaining the basis of policy shifts--in favor of what he calls "a new history of politics" that de-emphasizes rationality and focuses more upon processes, namely, "practices, rituals, passions and conflict" (p. 19). In the end, Trentmann finds that the First World War robbed free trade of its iconic status, instead coupling national security with the essence of British nationhood.

Trentmann's book represents a thorough exploration of the intricacies of British trade policy in the declining days of British hegemony. Relying largely upon contemporaneous sources, Trentmann discusses the human side of the trade policy debate. He takes the reader into the world of the poor consumer whose daily life was touched by the price of a loaf of bread and a quart of milk. At the same time, he traces the stories of state and societal elites as they struggled to come to grips with a world that was changing faster than their capacity to keep pace.

Trentmann sets for himself a difficult task, that is, trying to examine cultural change in an era in which there were no opinion polls. Instead, he relies upon contemporaneous reporting and correspondence about public reaction to free trade, a perilous enterprise that meets with mixed results. While the book features a rich discussion of events that illuminates a fascinating period in the history of British trade politics, Trentmann remains hostage to the inevitable biases inherent in the political accounts upon which he relies in emphasizing the hegemonic nature of popular support for free trade during the period preceding World War I. This limits the strength of the conclusion that one can draw. It is one thing to chronicle support for free trade; it is quite another to proclaim the iconic status of that support. Moreover, while studying...