Competing Free Trade Traditions in U.S. Foreign Policy from the American Revolution to the “American Century”

Free trade’s monolithic portrayal within the historiography of U.S. foreign policy has hidden the nation’s multiple, often competing, free trade ideological traditions.¹ This has resulted in a mixture of confusion and indifference regarding the stark ideological differences between and within political parties regarding U.S. foreign trade policy. It also minimizes economic nationalism’s central political and ideological role amid the heyday of the U.S. imperial project—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this chapter, I challenge these common misconceptions by putting into context a long-overlooked Anglo-American free trade tradition, then famously known as the “Manchester School” or “Manchester