Nineteenth-century free trade functioned as naval-enforced imperial control.

Evidence

The nineteenth century saw empire become defined by free trade within a new evolving international judicial order which enforced British interests to maintain their expanding world market, which was in turn enforced by their superior naval power. … It is still necessary to explain how the British combined hysteria around the pirate Wahhabi naval power and a rhetoric of global free trade and to remove challengers to maritime hegemony. — Robin Alexander Plant, Discuss the Relationship Between…, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to critiques of liberal internationalism as disguised coercion, e.g. the ‘informal empire’ literature on the Gulf and Indian Ocean.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Free Trade Was a Naval Weapon’ — how the rhetoric of open commerce and the reality of gunboat enforcement produced the modern maritime order.