Introduction: The Intersection of Trade and Conflict Since 1500

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the Dutch East India Company’s Governor General in the Indies, explained that trade and war were inseparably linked: ‘we cannot make war without trade nor trade without war’.¹ The utility of war and other violent methods to secure an advantageous commercial position was an extreme view even by the mercantilist standards of the day, but trade and conflict were commonly connected. About a hundred years later, Montesquieu, the Enlightenment political philosopher, reached the radically different conclusion that trade was an instrument of peace; thus in 1748, he wrote, ‘Peace is the natural effect of trade.’ Propelled by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (published in 1776), belief in the connection between trade and peace spread. Trade promoted interdependence and prosperity, which enhanced the economic benefits of peace and the economic costs of war. At the same time that the liberal conception of trade gained currency, there were counter-examples of the non-peaceful pursuit and consequences of trade. The transatlantic slave trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries captured and brutalized approximately 10 million people who were subsequently enmeshed in a violent system of labour in the New World, while at the same time causing tribal wars along Africa’s Gold Coast. The Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) were caused by the British desire to gain access to the vast Chinese market.