In 1819 few Britons believed in free trade but by 1885 it had become the common sense of the nation and Britain had built an imperial system around it. How did that happen?

The conclusion summarises the answers to the book’s four animating questions: How did modern slavery emerge on the global political agenda? Where do key actors in the global antislavery network draw the boundary between free and unfree labour? How does the multifaceted approach to modern slavery keep the different legal domains to which unfree labour is assigned from clashing? How do attempts to govern transnational forms of unfree labour reconfigure sovereignty? It argues that modern slavery laws attempt to mediate the escalating tensions around borders and markets created by neoliberal capitalism’s reliance on managed migration and free trade as engines of accumulation. Probing the social relations that propelled transnational modern slavery law, it reveals that the border between free and unfree labour is a contested and gendered act of governance operating across different scales. It concludes by considering the vexed question: what makes labour ‘free’?

The problems that afflict Pareto efficiency can be overcome if the criterion is rebuilt on preference-free foundations. A policy change passes the ‘availability test’ if it allows agents to afford whatever they purchased originally: Agents might not then be better off but no one can legitimately object to the change. One way to pass the availability test is to give agents the right to repeat their original transactions; a reform of rent control serves as an example. A second strategy stabilizes prices for consumers while letting the prices that firms face promote efficiency in production. A deregulation of a public utility, for example, can preserve consumer prices while giving firms an incentive to innovate. These policy alternatives show how to resolve the Schumpeterian dilemma of creative destruction: They harness the progressive feature of capitalism, that it fosters technological change, while protecting the individuals who can be harmed by the same forces. Conventional laissez-faire policies are in contrast difficult to justify even from within the orbit of traditional economic theory and can generate bitter social conflict. An application to opening an economy to free trade shows how to combine the advantages of technological change while satisfying the availability test.

This chapter argues that if anti-sweatshop activists want to help workers they should specifically target and boycott slave labor sweatshops such as those in China with forced Uyghur labor; advocate and monitor “ethical branding”; buy goods made in the Third World; pay children to go to school to reduce child labor; promote the process of development; and advocate for relaxing immigration restrictions.

The rise of The Port and the Mo clan coincided with the “Chinese century” in maritime East Asia and the peak of the Qing dynasty’s power. Their story also demonstrates a world whose core areas were not only at rough parity but also converging with both ends of Eurasia meeting, trading, and learning from each other in Southeast Asia. At the same time, this period implanted the seeds for an eventual divergence. European mercantile organizations and, later, states came to dominate the sea-lanes and control the flow of silver and finance. They were able to shape and set the rules for an emerging new order. Chinese merchants and immigrants eventually lost their military and political agency and were absorbed into the expanding European empires. Meanwhile, more firmly bounded states and nativist sentiments emerged in mainland Southeast Asia. Both factors deprived The Port of relatively unhindered access to the maritime trade routes and translocal networks. Nonetheless, the Mo continued to enjoy significant autonomy until the French colonization of the water world in 1867, taking advantage of the hazy and ill-defined borders in the water world.

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the contemporary political debates surrounding globalisation. It illustrates the main features of protests against the social consequences of a globalised economy, and it identifies some of the key political issues that scholars and students of International Relations must face when addressing the promotion of justice and effective governance within a more densely connected world.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) brought to greater prominence a question that has long vexed Australian foreign policy-makers: could they avoid choosing between the US security alliance and Australia’s complementary economic ties with China? Given the immense political capital invested in the BRI by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it was perhaps inevitable that Australia – like many other countries – had to declare its position. By so doing, however, Australia was forced to reckon with an issue that pitted its security interests directly against its economic ones. This chapter traces Australia’s evolving position on the BRI from 2016 to 2020, its interrelated justifications for rejecting the BRI, and the political and economic consequences of the decision. We show that debate over the BRI disrupted a longstanding consensus about the centrality of free trade and investment to Australian foreign economic policy. The BRI, we argue, signified a turning away from Australia’s previously enthusiastic support for global free trade to a more qualified security-sensitive approach.

The creation of a new order of security in the Mediterranean revolved around shared conceptions of threat and a common apparatus of cooperative repressive practices. This conclusion explains how the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, which European contemporaries perceived as one of the most urgent and persistent threats to security, was used to bring significant changes to the traditional diplomatic and maritime practices of the Mediterranean region. In fact, the fight against this imputed piratical threat fostered new ideas of the Mediterranean as a regional whole that could be rendered secure through policing efforts and imperial interventions. As a result, the political appearance of the Mediterranean Sea and its shorelines changed profoundly between 1815 and the closing years of the 1850s, when the Mediterranean seemed perfectly secure from piratical threats.

This chapter addresses the question: How did the term become familiar in society? Even the earliest uses demonstrate the integration of knowledge classification and engagement with large audiences. Derived from German usage, the term ‘applied sciences’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was key to underpinning a major new encyclopaedia project intended to structure knowledge and thinking. A succession of loyal editors realised his vision as the massive Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, advertised using Coleridge’s coinage. It would also be taken up by King’s College London seeking to describe its course teaching knowledge underlying engineering without claiming to be technical training. Meanwhile, the chemist J. F. W. Johnston used the term to promote the services he offered farmers. During and after debates over Corn Law Repeal, the press discussed Johnston’s applied science as a potential saviour of agriculture. The term’s use then snowballed.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the dominant reference of applied science changed. This chapter addresses the question: How could research be discussed using the old language of applied science previously used principally for pedagogy? Where was the continuity? The term’s meaning was constructed and reconstructed with the new organisations, such as the National Physical Laboratory and the newly incorporated civic universities. Therefore, the hectic emergence of a host of new organisations and awareness of research is of particular interest. In an era of growing foreign competition, Liberal politicians such as R. B. Haldane put their faith in applied science. Three key themes structure the analysis: the challenge of foreign powers, the growth of institutions, and the attraction of applied science to governments committed to maximising national efficiency but minimal interference in the market. The focus is on the years between 1899 and the outbreak of war.

The relationship between capitalism and nationalism escapes easy generalization – hardly surprising given the many conceptions of nationalism, and the many stages and varieties of capitalism. Let us begin, then, with some ideal-typical definitions.

Nationalism is a form of politicized ethnicity in which a self-identified cultural group seeks to create or succeeds in creating a nation-state of its own. It also refers to ideological goals and tangible policies oriented to the preservation or strengthening of the nation-state.

There are as many ways of defining capitalism as there are of nationalism. For our purposes, this definition is most useful. Capitalism is a political-economic system in which property rights are legally protected by the state, in which prices are set primarily by supply and demand in a market composed of profit-seeking entrepreneurs or companies, usually (but not always) employing free wage labor.

Chapter 2 probes early reformers’ modes of rhetoric. To raise awareness of distant injustices in the post-Emancipation era, they denounced the anomalous “virtual slavery” suffered by famine-stricken peasant cultivators, subordinated Indian princes, and the British working classes alike. This chapter clarifies how reformers were conceptualizing virtual slavery as an act of coercion and dehumanizing instrumentalization that was as injurious as chattel slavery. In so doing, they employed two rhetorical scripts: one that highlighted these virtual slaves’ degradation under colonial and monopolistic rule, and one that protested the conversion of native sovereigns into dishonored, disposable tools.

In this chapter, in broad strokes, we look at the governance of the trading system since its inception – across the GATT and WTO periods – and understand the headwinds that must be overcome to achieve needed systemic reforms.

In the early 1920s, Hubert Llewellyn Smith took the lead in developing a new framework for multilateral trade policy in the Economic Committee of the League of Nations. He integrated the existing bilateral treaty regime into the League by imposing new forms of international oversight and standardization – most notably by codifying the most-favoured-nation norm. He also crafted a new rule-making routine to support the development of standalone multilateral agreements on key topics such as customs administration. Llewellyn Smith worked hard to preserve the status of the British Empire as an autonomous but segmented sub-unit within the League but he also understood that doing so would constrain Britain’s leadership capacity. Consequently, he aired on the side of caution, seeking consensus, working incrementally, and avoiding bold provocation. His limited ambitions allowed him to focus on crafting a new multilateral process, with important consequences for the subsequent history of international trade policy in the interwar period and beyond.

In 1927, when Coquet launched his movement for a European customs union, Riedl initiated an elaborate programme to use the League to bring about Anschluss gradually by embedding Austro-German bilateral economic integration in a multilateral system. He sought to bypass the formal treaty constraints that prevented the Austrian and German governments from pursuing this course by facilitating low-level administrative rapprochement through business organizations, using the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). By the time Riedl arrived in the ICC in 1927, it had already become an important organizational auxiliary to the League. Up to that point, the ICC’s engagement in League trade policy had focused on specific areas of business regulation, such as commercial arbitration and trade credit. Riedl pushed the ICC into a more political role by intervening in debates about the fundamental architecture of trade treaties. In the process, Riedl provoked new debate about the League’s authority to mediate relations between national governments and international business.

George Thompson rose to pre-eminence as a lecturer through his work to bring about the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, and in its aftermath forged the first international anti-slavery movement with colleagues in the United States. As a Garrisonian abolitionist, he was committed to complete and immediate manumission. As a free trader, a member of the Manchester School, he became increasingly interested in how encouraging the development of suitable cotton from the Indian agricultural sector could undermine the power of American cotton planters and thereby nullify the Souths power in the market. His commitments to India included advocating for the deposed Raja of Satara, and attempts to bring down the British East India Company. On his first visit to India, he helped foster institutions that gave young men experience in debate and other forms of advocacy; on his second visit, under the cloud of financial distress following the failure of the Empire newspaper, he served as agent for a British textile firm. In the meantime, he served a term as MP for Tower Hamlets. Witnessing survivors of the Siege of Lucknow embarking in Calcutta, decades of Thompsons political experience came to the fore in a testament of performative empathy, insight, and anti-imperial advocacy.

Classical economic liberalism was the first perspective on political economy to achieve worldwide influence. Its most famous advocate was Adam Smith whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations became a foundational text for economic liberals that was known around the world by the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, some other European political economists consolidated the international dimension of the classical liberal economic perspective by building on Smith’s ideas, including David Ricardo, Richard Cobden, John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot. These and other European classical economic liberals were united in the belief that free trade and free markets would foster global prosperity, international peace, and individual freedom. At the same time, they did not always concur about the precise ways that free trade would generate these benefits or about which of them was most important. They also disagreed about the universal relevance of economic liberalism, their willingness to accept exemptions from free trade, their interest in international specialization and economic integration beyond free trade in goods as well as about the place of force, imperialism, civilizational discourse, and intergovernmental cooperation in the economic liberal project. In short, there were many distinct versions of classical economic liberalism.