is the dominant stream of liberalism, which has had other tributaries, but none so central or so strong.
On Method
Writing the intellectual history of a newspaper that covers the entire world and has come out on a weekly basis for the last 176 years has not been simple. Nor has it been a straightforward matter to choose how to organize and narrate that history, so that both general and specialist readers can hope to move through it with relative ease. What began as an article, turned into a dissertation and became a book has threatened at each stage to exceed the frame to which it was fitted – as in the famous Borges story, in which an obsessive group of cartographers draws a map of the world that expands until it is the same size as what it seeks to represent. Contrary to appearances, given the length of the present volume, principles of selection were applied to avoid that outcome.
Alternative paths could have been taken: that of a more or less traditional publishing history; or one that set the paper in a media studies frame, among the literary quarterlies, business journals and mass circulation dailies that have appeared and disappeared in London since the Victorian age. While I do discuss the location, production and distribution of the Economist – and the way other periodicals have competed with it for writers, readers and renown – my focus has been on ideas, and on connecting these to the broader material and ideological forces that have shaped ‘actually existing liberalism’ since 1843: radical demands for democracy, the ascent of finance in the global capitalist order, and imperial expansion, conflict, cooperation and continuing dominion. Three official books, and a few academic articles, have been written on other aspects of the Economist, or its attitude to one theme or another: railways, statistics, drugs, laissez-faire, America.41 Now that every issue has been digitized and made available online, future works can explore other subjects, sketched too lightly – or left out – of the portrait I have drawn here. To name just two cases, much more could be said on the way its views have evolved on climate change, or on the project of European integration.
In writing the history of the Economist as a history of liberalism, I confronted challenges particular to my source material: not just continuously and collectively published, but almost all of it anonymously. I have worked to attribute some of its most significant articles, and to explain the editorial environment in which they were composed, through extensive research. That has meant sifting the letters, memoirs and other papers which editors left behind, at archives in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford and elsewhere. Since most were prolific authors outside of the Economist, I have also made use of their books, articles and speeches, which range from treatises on the stock market and unemployment to politics, religion and even spy fiction, in my assessments of them and the paper. (Often these titles have helped to determine the authorship of articles – or to discern a disagreement – within the Economist itself.) From around the middle of the twentieth century, these sorts of sources could be supplemented with another: interviews. Between 2011 and 2018, I conducted over two dozen interviews with current and former Economist staffers. Robustly confident in their convictions, they were always generous and open, never troubling to inquire too deeply into the nature of my research, nor worry whether my findings might cast their work in a critical light. How could it? This book is richer for their insights: not just because of the colourful stories and character sketches they shared, but for their inside perspectives on the debates and turning points in the recent history of the Economist, from the Vietnam War to the drive for circulation in America, the decisions to endorse Thatcher and Reagan to the invasion of Iraq. The one cache of material I have been unable to access is the Economist’s own, which – largely destroyed in the Blitz, haphazardly stored since – is still being catalogued. As it is, a largish body of notes can be found at the back of this volume. This is where publishers insist on putting them, even if they contain – as they do here – not just sources, but vivid quotations, biographical asides, and historiographic discussions. My apologies for the inconvenience of their location to readers who take an interest in such things: commerce oblige, as today’s wisdom has it.
This study follows the Economist through the sequence of its editors, whose tenures organize the narrative, tracing the tone and direction that each has given to the paper. Variation in the texture of the story is one consequence, reflecting contrasts between different incumbents and their eras – yielding, for example, here a finer-grained sense of British politics or newsroom disputes, there a broader brush on wars or economic conjunctures. I start with a detailed contextual account of the political origins of the Economist and its links to the organized campaign for free trade in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and a consideration of the extraordinary figure of its founder, James Wilson – whose life and writings have been edulcorated in the few latter-day accounts we have of him. Then I pass to the paper’s famous second editor, Walter Bagehot, whose output and reputation are in a class by themselves in the history of the Economist, overtopping it, so that here uniquely it becomes the story of effectively one person. This sets the stage for the paper’s emergence as the voice of British finance capital at its global peak, punctuated by the exceptional tenure of Francis Hirst, who opposed Britain’s entry into the First World War and was fired in 1916. Disputes between interwar editor Walter Layton and John Maynard Keynes over the gold standard and how to respond to the Depression presage Britain’s global decline and the passing of the imperial sceptre to the United States. After the paper’s turn to America during the Second World War came an all-out commitment to Washington as the Cold War escalated, a fealty consummated in the eras of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Moving into the present, the story ends with what is now – rightly or wrongly – widely perceived as the contemporary crisis of liberalism, and looks at the ways the Economist has contributed to and tried to surmount it. In doing so, it pulls back to survey the long history of liberalism according to the Economist, and lays out a counter-narrative to which its actual record points. No one book can have the last word on the Economist. But I hope enough is said in these pages to alter whatever may come after them.
The 1830s and 1840s were the most tumultuous decades in the history of modern Britain: during this period, a social order forged in the seventeenth century came closer to being overturned than at any subsequent point. Yet in the end it bequeathed that order, albeit in modified form, to the present. Pressures bubbled during the Napoleonic Wars, and nearly boiled over after 1815, as twenty years of rising prices gave way to sharp trade depressions, deflation and discontent, amidst the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. From 1816 to 1819, protest spread in waves through northern manufacturing towns and rural parishes, with the smashing of power-looms and threshing machines, and bread riots involving laid-off operatives and farm labourers. The famous clash at St Peters Field on 16 August 1819 showed how quickly tensions in the country became political: reformers called a rally to demand parliamentary representation for the large towns and votes for working men, and more than 60,000 people packed into the centre of Manchester. Peterloo was the name given to the killings that followed, an ironic nod to the brave hussars who charged an unarmed crowd.
A decade later dissent once more assumed an organized form, this time briefly uniting the middle and working classes in urban political unions, just as agricultural workers were exploding into riot throughout the south of England. For the aristocracy that dominated the House of Commons, the three years from 1829 threatened an upheaval whose terrors it associated with the French Revolution. In 1832 a Reform Bill was passed whose purpose was to reconcile a rising middle class, ‘the intelligent and independent portion of the community’, with an oligarchic system and so divert it from any alliance with the masses below.1 In this at least it succeeded. Radical MPs from the industrial towns trickled