Description:

The Grand Strategy Program welcomes historian Marc-William Palen for a conversation on his new book. In Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press), Palen shows that while free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers in the present, free trade and globalization have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory, he explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order.

A historian at the University of Exeter, Palen is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He specializes in the intersection of British and American imperialism with a particular interest in exploring how political economy, gender, humanitarianism, and ideology have shaped global imperial expansion. Palen will be in conversation with Michael Brenes, co-Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Lecturer in History.