The project resulting from this idea is mainly interested in narratives of justification in the global and local arena and in their impact on each other. To analyze the relation between different layers, four research projects intend to follow a micro-macro-level approach of a so-called jeu d’échelles. Only a multi-dimensional approach can fully grasp the diversity of experiences of individual actors in Free Trade regimes and the plurality of its representations. The differentiation and entanglement in global and local arenas of ‘good reasons’ affected the multi-layered interactions between political organization, ideas and economic activities.
Free Trade played a crucial role in Victorian visions of global order and was of paramount importance to the self-perception of Britishness. The notions of Free Trade and the Rule of Law evolved side-by-side, as competing principles. The first research project focuses on the tension between these two conceptions. It also hints at the ambivalences of presumably ‘good government’ and the paradox of Free Trade, which had to be dealt with in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious model colony of the Raj. Questions about the legal validity and legitimacy of law vis-à-vis the colonial rule existed both in the courtroom and the British public.
’Economic’ and ‘moral’ arguments often clashed and theoretically excluded each other. Such paradox can be identified in the debates on the abolition of slavery. Free Trade regimes relied on the privatization of property rules as well as on labour agreements or employment relationships. These, in turn, were based on the principles of contractual freedom and personal liberty. Along with these, new forms of forced labour developed. These were declared as ‘free labour’. The question remains to what extent the success or failure of Free Trade regimes, and hence the abolition of slavery, can be seen as the result of underlying normative or economic ideas, and how far the results of their implementation have to be considered as both unjust and ineffective according to its own rationale. This will be explored in a two day conference.
Contemporary politicians, administrators, private and national trading companies, merchants, intellectuals and public opinion became increasingly involved in a discourse on the benefits and shortcomings of Free Trade regimes and respective techniques of governance with a focus on international market competition, industrialization and social progress. These debates also involved a re-assessment of the nation as relevant actor. Despite strong references to the nation state in the context of global dynamics the concept of nation seemed to be increasingly affected by the processes of modernization. A further research project looks at the British and the French colonial Empire whose colonial expansion shaped the production of European historical knowledge about the nation-state and had an impact on Empire-building and, at the same time, the process of globalization. Therefore, Europe and ‘the West’ cannot be construed without the non-West.
In order to link the global, national and local levels, a micro-level approach seems indispensable to complement the macro perspective and to include the intermediate levels of experience. The latter provided the background to everyday encounters of individuals with Free Trade regimes: The implementation of a liberalized economic order gradually altered long established trade practices which relied on collective ownership of land and on a combination of economic, social and political dependence. Practices of justice and their narratives of justification inevitably changed, as the fourth study about the abolition of serfdom and land reform in Nassau in the first half of the nineteenth century illustrates, from a local/regional historian’s point of view.
In conclusion, all projects tend to link universal Free Trade regimes with their particular practices.
