Free Trade

Free Trade, as Duncan Wedderburn explains it to Bella Baxter, is a doctrine whose promise of commercial freedom conceals the power to determine who may sell, what may be produced, and where wealth will flow. His examples connect imperial force and market competition to the destruction of livelihoods, famine, and falling wages. The account is presented as a lesson from Wedderburn, not as a detached economic history: Bella tests its moral logic, and his answers expose the distance between diagnosing injustice and being willing to oppose it.

Wedderburn’s definition

In his account, the British Parliament defines freedom as the ability to buy as cheaply as possible and sell as dearly as possible anywhere, backed by the army and navy. The apparent liberty of exchange is therefore inseparable from state power. Wedderburn describes commerce not as a meeting of equals but as a system in which Britain can enter markets, exclude competitors, and impose consequences on other societies. His image of famine cutting through countries like a saw makes the violence of that system vivid: economic policy may operate through prices and trade rules, yet its effects reach bodies and communities.

The language of freedom also sits uneasily beside Wedderburn’s account of labor. When Bella observes that the Americans have abolished slavery, he answers that modern industry finds it cheaper to hire workers for days or weeks and leave them to seek another master when their labor is no longer needed. The workers are formally free to look for work, but their need to find it allows employers to lower wages when many people are competing for employment. In this formulation, the end of one form of bondage does not end exploitation; it changes how employers secure labor and how the burden of insecurity is distributed.

Indian cloth and imperial control

Wedderburn’s account of India begins with the skill of its weavers, who had produced cotton cloth and muslin that he describes as the finest in the world. British merchants were permitted to sell there, while the French, who had tried to do the same, were driven out. The market was thus not open to free competition on equal terms: military and political power determined which merchants could take part.

The arrangement changed when British manufacturers learned to make cloth more cheaply with machinery in factories at home. Britain then needed Indian raw cotton and Angora wool, while British commercial power could prevent others from buying Indian cloth. The change in production did not simply offer consumers a cheaper alternative; it redirected the market around the needs of British industry and restricted the livelihoods of Indian producers. Wedderburn recalls a governor’s report that the plains of Dacca were littered with the bones of weavers. The stark image gives human consequence to the economic chain he has just described, turning competition and cheaper manufacture into a history of ruined work.

Ireland: famine under the rules of trade

Wedderburn next describes Ireland, where he says that eight out of ten people lived on potatoes. Many peasants depended on poor soil that yielded little else, while money they earned through other means went to landlords descended from English invaders and conquerors. Those landlords owned the richer land where corn was grown. When a disease destroyed the potato crop, the population’s dependence on a single staple became a famine crisis.

The response, in Wedderburn’s account, shows how commercial principle could take precedence over feeding the people living in the country. The British Parliament debated closing Irish ports until Irish grain had been consumed by the Irish population. The proposal was voted down because it would interfere with Free Trade; soldiers instead ensured that the grain reached the ships. Wedderburn says that nearly a million people starved and a million and a half left Ireland. Those who reached Britain found work at wages low enough to undercut British workers, while British industries profited. The account therefore links the famine not only to hunger and emigration but also to a labor market in which displaced people’s desperation helped weaken other workers’ bargaining power.

Bella’s challenge and the limits of the lesson

Wedderburn’s lecture repeatedly insists that the language of freedom should be judged by its material consequences. Yet his role is not simply that of a neutral instructor: he presents himself as someone willing to expose the cruelty of the system, while Bella has to decide what his analysis means in practice. After hearing his account of Ireland, she asks whether he would have voted to close the ports if he had been in Parliament. He replies that he would not have dared vote against the proposal if he had known he would later have to face her.

Bella nearly answers him with an insult, recognizing the cunning in his reply, but swallows it and walks away. The exchange leaves his position morally unsettled. He identifies the human cost of commercial policy and can describe how it benefits Britain, but his answer makes Bella’s judgment of him part of the scene: explanation is not the same as resistance. Free Trade emerges as both an economic arrangement and a test of responsibility, one that asks whether a person who understands the machinery of exploitation will risk opposing it.

The wider political economy

The examples form a connected argument about how wealth and hardship are organized. In India, control of markets and industrial competition imperil skilled producers; in Ireland, the priority given to trade coincides with mass starvation and emigration; in Britain, workers made desperate for employment help drive down wages. Across these cases, the gains are presented as concentrated among merchants, manufacturers, landlords, and industries, while the costs fall on people with less power over land, work, or policy.

That pattern echoes Wedderburn’s broader account of poverty and industrial society. He describes official responses to unemployment that include coercive institutions and deliberately grim poor-houses, and he argues that hunger and illness can weaken the poor and limit their numbers rather than resolve their deprivation. This context sharpens the meaning of his critique: Free Trade is not isolated from the state’s treatment of poverty, but belongs to a wider order in which law, force, markets, and labor discipline work together. The book gives the doctrine its force through concrete reversals of its promise: freedom for merchants can mean exclusion for competitors, freedom of contract can mean lowered wages for workers, and commercial rules can be upheld while people starve.