The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism

Download or read book The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism written by Bernard Semmel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-02-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism seeks to uncover some of the intellectual origins of the imperialism of the classic period, the sources from which later theories of imperialism were constructed, and the character of the ideology which underlay the dismantling of the old colonial system and the construction of the Victorian Pax Britannica. The author discusses the development and diffusion of a number of the central arguments of the 'science' of political economy, from the standpoint of a historian rather than an economist, which were crucial not only to the construction of theories of capitalist imperialism, but also served as a spur both to efforts at colonization, and to establishing a British Workshop of the World.