“Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market 1860-1892”

As the countries of today´s European Union advance toward a common currency, there is a sense that history is being made. Few commentators seem aware that these efforts toward economic unity represent not the first but the second major attempt to establish a common European marketplace. This book retrieves form disparate archives a comprehensive account of an earlier, forgotten attempt at pan-Europeanism that regulated most of European trade between 1860 and 1892. Peter T. Marsh describe the rise and fall of this first common market, and initiative that resonates in many intriguing ways with the experience of the European Monetary Union more than a century later.

In the late Victorian age, Marsh explains, tariffs rather than interest rates were the levers of commercial negotiation. The network of tariff-reducing treaties that spread across western and central Europe in the 1860s grew from a British initiative and precipitated a prosperous expansion of trade and an open European market. But when economic depression revived protectionism on the Continent, Britain refused to restore its tariff barriers. France withdrew from the free trade network, which was reconstructed around Germany, while Britain turned away to cultivate poorer prospects overseas.