Post-war Efforts for Freer Trade: Being the Cobden Lectures Delivered at the London School of Economics on February 2nd, 3rd and 4th, 1938

William E. Rappard’s 1938 Cobden Lectures reconstruct the League of Nations’ frustrated campaign for freer trade after the First World War and ask why official unanimity in favor of liberal commerce produced almost no liberalization. His thesis is deliberately complex: the failure cannot be explained only by economic ignorance or special interests, although both matter. It arose from the contradiction between a world verbally committed to interdependence and a system of sovereign states made anxious by depression, currency disorder, debts, social dislocation, and above all the expectation of war.

freer trade made for truer peace as well as for greater prosperity

The historical part follows a sequence of international disappointments. Wilson’s Fourteen Points had promised:

“the removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.”

Yet Rappard shows that this demand was already diluted in the Covenant. “Removal” became equality, then “just” or “equitable” treatment, then equity hedged by exceptions for devastated regions and sovereign discretion. This “fading-out process” prefigures the League’s later failures. Brussels in 1920 linked trade recovery to peace, goodwill, sound money, and the dismantling of wartime restrictions; Genoa in 1922 diagnosed postwar “economic nationalism”; the 1923 Geneva convention on customs formalities achieved limited success because it attacked not tariff walls but administrative “barbed wires.”

The central episode is the World Economic Conference of 1927, which Rappard treats as the best expert diagnosis of the interwar trade problem. It recognized that unilateral economic measures provoke retaliation, imitation, and defensive bargaining, so liberalization required simultaneous or “parallel” action. Its boldest sentence was:

“the time has come to put a stop to the growth of customs tariffs and to reverse the direction of the movement”

But the diagnosis was stronger than the will to act. The conference’s causes—monetary instability, wartime industries, unemployment, self-sufficiency, bargaining tariffs, revenue needs, defense industries, and surplus labor—became Rappard’s analytical framework. After 1927 came abortive efforts on prohibitions, quotas, commodities, tariff truces, and European cooperation, all overwhelmed by depression. The London Conference of 1933 becomes tragic theater: universal attendance, expert preparation, and dramatic speeches, yet no agreement. Roosevelt’s refusal to stabilize the dollar supplied the immediate break, but Rappard doubts the delegates were near agreement on trade anyway.

The second half turns from chronology to explanation. Rappard’s key conceptual move is to distinguish free trade as a means from prosperity as only one political end among others. If governments seek maximum national income, protection is usually bad policy. But if they seek employment, social peace, peasant stability, fiscal revenue, debt service, currency defense, imperial cohesion, or military security, protection can appear politically unavoidable even when economically costly. This lets him avoid a simplified opposition between enlightened economists and irrational politicians.

He therefore classifies protectionist arguments by purpose: infant-industry claims, bargaining tariffs, and cost-equalizing duties; fiscal duties; social-economic defenses against debt, currency instability, and unemployment; and social defenses of agriculture as “an element of national stability.” The decisive explanation, however, is war. The First World War created new customs frontiers, expanded state control, protected industries born under blockade, and generated vested interests. More importantly, it made self-sufficiency seem prudent.

Thus those who could, will not, and those who would, cannot.

In democracies, governments lack power to impose losses on protected minorities; in dictatorships, they possess power but prefer autarky because interdependence limits national independence. The old liberal belief remains true but incomplete:

international trade is the life-blood of peace

The converse is equally true: fear of war poisons trade. Rappard’s relevance lies in this sober anatomy of liberal internationalism under insecurity. Economic nationalism is not merely doctrinal error; it is a political response to danger, distributional loss, and institutional weakness.

the message I bring you from Geneva cannot honestly be one of optimism

The final lesson is not anti-trade but anti-reductionist. Cobden taught peace through free trade; Rappard replies that free trade also requires political peace. Scientific economic analysis can expose the costs of autarky, but only statesmanship can create the security and generosity required to enact it.

trade alone cannot ban international hostility and suspicions.