Friedrich List and the Imperial origins of the national economy

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a critical reexamination of the works of Friedrich List by placing them in the context of nineteenth-century imperial economies. I argue that List's theory of the national economy is characterised by a major ambivalence, as it incorporates both imperial and anti-imperial elements. On the one hand, List pitted his national principle against the British imperialism of free trade and the relations of dependency it heralded for late developers like Germany. On the other hand, his economic nationalism aimed less at dismantling imperial core–periphery relations as a whole than at reproducing these relations domestically and expanding them globally. I explain this ambivalence with reference to List's designation of imperial Britain as the prime example of successful economic development and a model to be emulated by late industrialisers. List thereby fashioned his ideas on national development out of the historical experience of an empire whereby he internalised its economic logic and discourse of the civilising mission. Consequently, List's national economy culminated in an early vision of the global north–south relations, in which the global industrial-financial core would expand to include France, Germany and the USA, while the rest of the world would be reduced to quasi-colonial agrarian hinterlands.

KEYWORDS:

• Friedrich List
• liberalism
• nationalism
• capitalism
• imperialism
• free trade
• mercantilism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Mark Blyth and two anonymous reviewers from New Political Economy for their astute and constructive criticisms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Onur Ulas Ince (Ph.D., Cornell, 2013) is Assistant Professor of Political Theory in the Department of International Relations at Koç University, Istanbul. His research on capitalism, colonialism, and the history of political thought has been published or is forthcoming in The Review of Politics, The Journal of Politics, Polity, and Rural Sociology.

Notes

1. Robbins (1998: 240) in his acclaimed LSE lectures compared List only to Adam Smith and Karl Marx in terms of the influence he exerted on the economic policy of his time.

2. See, for instance, the report on ‘state capitalism’ published in The Economist (Wooldridge 2012); Halper's (2010) neologism, ‘Beijing consensus’; Bremmer (2010) and MacGregor's (2012) portents of the ‘end of the free market’ and the rise of ‘authoritarian capitalism.’ The opinion is succinctly captured by Prestowitz (2012), who writes ‘most of Asia, much of South America, the Middle East, Germany and parts of Europe are playing neo-mercantilism'.

3. For an authoritative personal and intellectual biography of List (see Henderson 1983).

4. List spent considerable time in France, first in 1822, then in 1831 and 1837–1840. The latest and longest phase of his residence coincided with the wake of the French national controversy on free trade in 1834. For an excellent reconstruction of nineteenth-century French debates on protectionism and free trade, as well as the impact of these debates on List's political economy (see Todd 2015), especially chapter 4.

5. Dupin also used the term ‘productive forces' in referring to the development of industry, though he and List arrived at these cognate concepts independently (Todd 2015: 149).

6. It should be noted that Smith held an ambivalent position on the relationship between agriculture and manufactures. On the one hand, he contrasted the ‘unnatural and retrograde' urban-commercial development of Europe with the ‘natural course' of opulence in agrarian American colonies. On the other, he expressly conceded that division of labour, the principal force of productivity, found greater room for improvement in manufacturing than in agriculture, and that civilised and wealthy countries were distinguished from their barbarous and poor counterparts by their advancement in manufactures (see Smith 1981: 308–11, Hopkins 2013).

7. List frequently adduced as support to his protectionist advocacy the continental blockade during the Napoleonic Wars, which cut off trade with Britain and forced France and Russia to develop their own manufacturing capacity. He reserved special praise for Count Karl Nesselrode in Russia and Antoine Chaptal in France as practical statesmen who oversaw the industrial policy of the two countries and grasped the centrality of industrial independence to economic independence more broadly. Chaptal, in particular, represented for List the revival of Colbertian policies, which List wholeheartedly supported and which earned Chaptal the reputation of ‘a Colbert of the nineteenth century’ (List 1909a: 80–1, Henderson 1989a: 106).

8. Gallagher-Robinson thesis has not been without its detractors. For a frontal criticism (see Platt 1968).

9. A major obstacle to effective tariffs was the preponderance of Prussian agrarian interests that preferred a more liberal trade regime than demanded by Rhenish and south German manufacturing concerns. For a brief and instructive account (see Henderson 1935). List was familiar with the effects of fragmented economic interests on the obstruction of tariff policy, as he had observed a comparable dynamic play out between the Southern planters and Northeastern industrialists in the United States prior to his return to Europe.

10. For an instructive historical account of English protectionist strategies (see O'Brien 1998, Chang 2003: 19–24, Morgan 2002). Reinert (2005: 49) also notes the similarity between the German economic tradition and pre-Smithian English economics.

11. List trained his sights on George Canning and William Huskisson as early as his Outlines of American Political Economy. There he wrote, ‘the seeming adherence of Messrs. Canning and Messrs. Huskisson to Messrs. Say and Smith's theory is one of the most extraordinary of first-rate political maneuvers that have ever been played upon the credulity of the world’ (List 1909b: 178).

12. For a detailed examination of Fichte's theory of closed commercial state (see Nakhimovsky 2011). List's writings on the American economy in the late 1820s betray an autarkist streak, which can be attributed to the uniquely continental scale of the US economy that suggested self-sufficiency as a viable idea. By the late 1830s, List openly distanced his position, very much like Thiers, from autarky and free trade alike (Todd 2015: 146).

13. Bell and Sylvest (2006: 211) define liberal internationalism as the belief that ‘it was possible to build a just order on the basis of existing patterns of cooperation between distinct political communities'. List's theory belonged to this species of thought by virtue of its equidistance to utopian cosmopolitanism and ethnocentric nationalism.

14. On nineteenth-century ideologies of imperial rule (see Mehta 1999, Moloney 2001, Pitts 2005).

15. Although List was very knowledgeable in British economic history and political economy, he did not spend any substantial time in Britain. He paid only two visits to the island towards the end of his life, which do not appear to have had a major impact on the principles of his political economy (see Henderson 1989b).

16. It is worth noting that List did not spare European countries from the civilisational hierarchy of his theory of development. He placed Spain, Portugal and Southern Italy in the barbarous first stage of economic progress (List 1909a: 96).

17. List saw the absence of an enlightened and entrepreneurial middle class as both the cause and the sign of a country's socioeconomic backwardness. He adduced the economic stagnation of Russia and the demise of Poland as evidence for this observation (List 1909a: 82, 139). List was in fact echoing a broader agreement amongst Western European philosophers and political economists who indexed civilisational advancement to the growth of a robust ‘third estate’ located between the leisurely aristocratic classes and the mass of poor peasants and labourers (see Adamovsky 2010).

18. On this point, List prefigured Marx (1978a, 1978b) and Marx and Engels (1978), who would pour scorn on the peasantry as ‘a sack of potatoes’ who languished in the ‘idiocy of rural life,’ and who had no hope of redemption until national bourgeoisies of continental Europe would stand on their feet and bring upon them the calamitous but progressive transformation that the British rule wrought in India. Also see Semmel (1993) on Marx and Engels's engagement with theories of economic nationalism.

19. This is not to imply that ‘civilisation’ itself was an inherently imperial concept, though it lent itself to be employed for justifying claims of imperial tutelage over colonial populations. For a detailed study (see Mehta 1999). Secondly, ‘civilising mission’ could rest as much on agrarianist arguments as industrial ones, as attested by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson's denial to Native Americans proprietary rights in America until they enclosed and ‘improved’ the land (see Arneil 1995).

20. There exists a substantial literature that critiques the Westphalian paradigm from political, legal and economic angles (see, for example, Benton 2010, Teschke 2003).

21. List saw the agricultural protectionism of the Corn Laws as a colossal anomaly to Britain's propensity to become the ‘industrial metropolis of the world’ and attributed this aberration to British landowners’ lack of vision (List 1983: 138).

22. For a theorisation of the colonial empire, rather than the nation-state, as the politico-legal framework of commercial-capitalist relations (see Ince 2014). On the importance of colonial commerce in developing capitalist techniques of mass production, processing and consumption in early-modern England (see Pincus 2009: 82–7, Zahedieh 2010).

23. Marx (1976: 931) would reiterate this argument in Capital: ‘The United States are, speaking economically, still only a colony of Europe.’ Gallagher and Robinson (1953: 10) restrict this colonial relationship to the southern states of the USA.

24. On the profound, if under-acknowledged, influence of List's theory on neo-Marxist critiques of imperialism (see Semmel 1993: 165–6, 188–9).

25. These notes of alarm closely mirrored the concerns of French protectionists like Dupin, who warned that ‘absolute liberty’ in foreign trade would leave France with ‘one or two industries’ (Todd 2015: 126).

26. Further dramatising the colonial imagery, List (1909a: 264) wrote,

the islanders would not even grant to the poor Germans what they conceded to the conquered Hindoos … In vain did the Germans humble themselves to the position of hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Britons. The latter treated them worse than a subject people.

27. The tacit reference here is to Chakrabarty (2000). I argue that List offers us a glimpse into another aspect of provinciality of Europe, which eludes Chakrabarty's optic of ‘historical difference’ and cannot be accessed without due attention to the language of political economy in which vagaries of imperialism were articulated.

28. List was not an ethnocentric nationalist. His American citizenship aside, he addressed his works equally to American, French and German audiences. He also distanced himself from essentialist conceptions of race and blood, which he deemed irrelevant to economic development. Yet, the secular Enlightenment understanding of the nation to which he subscribed also entailed a standard of viability in terms of size, population and resources. On these grounds, List deemed the Netherlands and Denmark to be unviable nations and envisaged their eventual annexation by a unified Germany (see List 1909a: 56–7, 133).

29. ‘Less advanced nations’ (‘minder vorgerückter Nationen’ in the original) also included backward, agrarian countries of Southern Europe (see footnote 16 above). Yet List nowhere makes a case for imperial tutelage over these countries the way he deemed necessary and inescapable for Asia. Reasons for this differential treatment are discussed below.

30. List's case for late-industrialising nations and his defense of colonial expansion as economic strategy explains his enthusiastic support for the French occupation of Algeria, further illustrating his preference for a European, as opposed to narrowly German, cause for catching up with Britain. He even obtained a commission from his friend Thiers for his son to serve as a military officer in Algeria (Todd 2012). For German colonial expansion, List personally recommended Central and South America. The American experience of compounding formal independence from imperial Britain with ongoing settler-colonial expansionism appears to be a major inspiration here, formed during List's American sojourn.

31. List frequently spoke of Russia, Turkey and Napoleonic France as ‘empires’ (‘Reichs’) – ‘die russischen Reichs,’ ‘die türkischen Reichs,’ ‘das französisches Kaiserreich’. His invocations of ‘German Empire’ (‘deutschen Reichs’) are strictly restricted to the Holy Roman Empire. Curiously, he refrained from coupling ‘English’ and ‘British’ with ‘empire', except for ‘her great Indian Empire’ (‘sein großes ostindisches Reich’) (List 1909a: 42, 51, 59, 73, 82).

32. Here List once more foreshadowed Marx and Engels (1978: 477), who would attribute the economic penetration of Asia to mass-produced, cheap European commodities that ‘batter down all Chinese walls'.

33. List's consistent referral to colonial populations as ‘peoples’ rather than ‘nations’ would appear not to be accidental. The idea that backward colonial populations would attain national consciousness thanks to the political tutelage of advanced nations was the backbone of nineteenth-century liberal imperialism.

34. According to Clark (2011: 114), a paradoxical source of instability of nineteenth-century British hegemony was that Britain's capacity to lead its European contenders by the force of example also proved to be the primary push behind the race to colonisation and militarisation.

35. In 1846, List penned a memorandum addressed by British Prime minister Sir Robert Peel, proposing an Anglo-German alliance against the inevitable economic ascendancy of the USA and the aggressive foreign policy of Russia (see Henderson 1989b: 124–5).

36. Once again, the USA provided List with the resources with which to build projections of a federated Europe and even a federated world in which capital, commodities and labour would flow freely (List 1909a: 103).

37. List's vision of a World Trade Congress can be interpreted as prefiguring the Mandate System of the interwar period that juridified the nineteenth-century colonial discourse of the civilising mission by instituting the ‘dual mandate’ of promoting economic development and material welfare in mandate territories (see Anghie 2005, Rist 2008).

38. Without accounting for the emancipatory promise of Listian ideas, we cannot explain their appeal to many nineteenth-century developmental projects on the periphery of Europe, where ‘Adam Smith was regarded as the equal of Friedrich List – where authors such as Carey, Hamilton or St. Simon … were believed to provide superior guidance on the path to growth, than Mill and Marshall’ (Psalidopoulos and Mata 2002: 6).

39. List's influence permeated the economically and politically peripheral countries of Europe at the same time it extended to extra-European contexts. In the hundred years following its publication, the National System was translated into a dozen European languages. Even in countries where it circulated only in its German original, like the late-Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Turkey, it left a significant intellectual impact, especially amongst the modernising elites (Todd 2015: 153).

40. This is more than an imagistic analogy. The radical swadeshi activist Radhakamal Mukherjee did extend the critique of colonial division of labour to the town-country division within the nation-state and argued that ‘skill, enterprise, knowledge, and wealth’ drained from the village to the city (Goswami 2004: 239).

41. It is suggestive that some of the European countries criticised for their lack of competitiveness today, like Spain, Portugal and Italy, were included by List amongst those backward and ‘barbarous’ regions that would benefit from the civilising impact of free trade with the advanced countries (List 1983: 50).