| | All models of trade are normative - not only do they say something about the way trade works, they say something about how the exchange of commodities should work. This is the case even when trade models are expressed in the scientific language of orthodox economics. This issue of ROAPE is published on the bicentennial of the abolition (in Britain at least) of the trade in African people to plantation owners across the Atlantic. For those who defended this 'triangular trade' that contributed centrally to industrialisation in northern Europe, the case was often made with reference to the imperatives of the market and the 'efficiency' of the slave plantation system. Perhaps this example, more than any other in the history of European empire and the predations it has imposed on other parts of the world, demonstrates how references to market exchange to justify regimes of accumulation can serve as powerful ideological devices. And, as the slave trade flourished in the late eighteenth century, the British abolitionist movement used the transnational social relations generated by the slave trade to argue that peoples in different parts of the world shared a common moral space defined by the fact that the consumption of 'slave sugar' in London was an act of complicity in what one can reasonably call a global crime against humanity. Indeed, transnational capitalist trade relations have proven to have generated a diverse range of progressive political mobilisations in Britain and beyond: the 'free' sugar of the early 1800s, the Fair Trade movement, the boycotting of sweatshop commodities, the Anti-Apartheid Movement's boycotting of South African goods, and so on. Trade is politics: just as capitalism is based in the social relations of the workplace, relatedly, contemporary circuits of commodities are not a result of the timeless workings of the market mechanism (however imperfect) but are premised on those very same social relations. It is very clear that now more than ever, trade is managed by (and often within) transnational corporations in an increasingly detailed fashion, commodities are massively infused with symbolisms of liberal consumer power, and the regulation of trade is strongly (but neither transparently nor straightforwardly) influenced by international business. |
