The mandate Open Door policy institutionalized the free-trade-brings-peace thesis

Evidence

In contrast to the monopolist practices of the old trading companies, the mandate system guaranteed ‘equal economic opportunity’ in the mandates for all League members. Rappard framed this ‘Open Door’ policy as a recognition that international commerce led to peace. We have seen that this sweetness-of-commerce thesis can be traced back to the eighteenth century, but Rappard credited it to the ‘great trade emancipator and peacemaker’ Richard Cobden. In 1842 (at the height of his campaign against the Corn Laws), Cobden argued that the ‘colonial system, with all its dazzling appeals to the passions of the people, can never be got rid of except by the indirect processes of Free Trade’. In contrast, as a typical neoliberal, Rappard was not prepared to leave the fortunes of commerce to laissez-faire. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 90

Categorization

• XREF: Ties the sweetness-of-commerce thesis to the reader’s market-ethics debate; connects Cobden’s anti-Corn-Laws campaign to colonial trade regimes. — connects to: Mandate Open Door policy institutionalized commerce-as-peace before laissez-faire gave way — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 90
• SEED: Essay angle: the Open Door mandates as an early institutional template for market-access conditionality in modern trade-and-human-rights law.