Description
This paper historicises the current sense of a “collapsing liberal order” by returning to an earlier hegemonic transition that the contemporary, US-centric debate tends to forget: Britain’s drawn-out turn from free trade to protectionism between the 1880s and the 1930s. Drawing on archival sources, it shows that the concepts and policy ideas brought to life by the US–China rivalry - reciprocity and retaliation, “unfair trade,” the strategic use of tariffs, and the reorganisation of economic blocs - were already being developed and deployed by a declining liberal hegemon a century ago. Against systemic IPE theories’ tendency to read policy as a near-automatic response to material decline, the paper foregrounds the path-breaking agency of critical individuals who reinterpreted structural conditions and acted as “switchmen,” redirecting the trading order rather than merely registering its shifts. The aim is conceptual as much as historical: to show that terms like “liberal order” and “its collapse” compress a far richer repertoire used to conceptualise the re-organisation of economic relations that were at once imperial and regional — mercantilism, the “scientific tariff,” reciprocity, agency within structure — and to recover that vocabulary as a way of thinking about today’s restructuring of the global economic order, including the rise of China, without flattening it into a single US-centred story.