OUR iron industry is DEAD; dead as mutton. Our silk industry is DEAD, assassinated by the FOREIGNER. Turn your eyes where you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied RADICAL philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of our TRADE. Yes, the volume of trade is still large, but it is a volume which is NO LONGER PROFITABLE. I suspect free imports of the MURDER of our industries.

That sounds like Donald Trump. It isn’t.

Those lines come from late-nineteenth-century British protectionists, speaking inside an empire that feared decline. The rhetoric feels modern because the emotional logic stays the same: “we played fair, they cheated, and now we need protection.”

This protectionist language emerged in Britain before and now in the United States, countries that once pushed free trade across the world.

Why?

Britain’s open-trade identity and its breaking point

For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain considered trade as a struggle in which strong states imposed conditions on weaker ones. In this period, Britain relied on territorial expansion and colonial power to secure markets and resources.

Then, ideas from liberal thinkers like Smith and Ricardo reshaped how British society understood trade, challenging the belief that nations grow richer by harming rivals. Political leaders built on this logic and promoted free trade as a way for both sides to gain.

The political and economic hegemony of the United Kingdom made liberal trade rules spread fast. From the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty with France in 1860, countries in Europe signed more than fifty bilateral trade agreements in less than fifteen years. That strategy helped British commerce, but it also created a powerful narrative: Britain prospered because Britain stayed open.

The system of bilateral tariff reduction cracked after 1873, when collapsing agricultural prices and broader economic stress pushed Russia, France, Italy, Germany, and the United States toward protectionism. This reaction against free trade changed British debate, with a growing sense of “unfairness” and “revenge against the foreigner.”

“Fair trade” rarely means fair

By the late nineteenth century, the United Kingdom no longer felt secure at the top of the world economy. UK exports lost ground abroad, and high foreign tariffs pushed British firms out of markets they once dominated. Meanwhile, Germany and the United States emerged as industrial powers behind protectionist barriers. That shift bred resentment toward open markets.

In 1881, Conservative radicals and parts of industry gave that anger a name by launching the “Fair Trade” movement in The Times. Its message was simple and powerful: if free trade only worked one way, Britain needed “retaliatory duties” to fight back. This group wanted “fairness” against “unfair” outsiders, using tariffs as the path back to national strength.

Once leaders talk about trade in terms of “fairness,” tariffs stop looking like a policy choice and start looking like a moral response. If foreigners “assassinated” the domestic industry, tariffs became self-defence, and defending the nation justifies using every available tool. That logic produces a paradox: fair traders want to use tariffs to pressure others to lower tariffs. Using the words of historian Sydney Zebel, their goal was “to force, by one method or another, a lowering of these tariff barriers in order to alleviate the distress at home.”

Trump uses the same strategy today. Tariff threats become leverage to demand “reciprocal” deals. However, the context differs. Britain faced a world sliding back into protectionism, while Trump operates in a world where trade barriers have fallen for decades. Yet the underlying anxiety looks familiar, with new challengers undermining previous dominance over other nations.

The previous Trump: Joseph Chamberlain

Trump’s style resonates more with The Sopranos than with Bush, Reagan, or Nixon. But the language itself isn’t new. It often echoes the language of Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914).

As Secretary of State for the Colonies (1895–1903) and leader of the Liberal Unionist Party (1886-1912), Chamberlain reshaped British politics towards protectionism. He promised national strength abroad while deepening political divisions at home, splitting both Liberal and Conservative parties. Like Trump, he started as a businessman, hated the aristocratic leaders who ruled the government at the time, and became politically famous through harsh attacks on Liberal leaders for weakness and inconsistency. His personal charisma drove supporters to believe in him as much as MAGA acolytes do with Trump. After his death, they held annual “Chamberlain Day” gatherings.

In 1903, Chamberlain helped launch the Tariff Reform League, a well-funded pressure group that turned the “Fair Trade” movement into a more structured organization. He wanted to transform the British Empire into a single trading bloc that could compete with the rising industrial capacities of Germany and the United States, powers that protected home markets and supported national firms in ways British tariff reformers called “unfair”.

The “big revolver” theory of bargaining for declining powers

Replace Germany and the United States with China, and the pattern looks familiar.

The United States watches China’s economic and technological rise with a mix of fear and anger. Policy debates center on subsidies, state-backed firms, and industrial strategy, but public rhetoric often reduces all of that to one word: “unfair.” Trump uses this language to impose “fair” conditions on both allies and rivals, arguing that “fairness” can protect American workers, bring manufacturing back, and restore economic strength at home.

A century earlier, Joseph Chamberlain made a similar argument. For him, protecting British industry was inseparable from protecting the British Empire. Industrial decline meant lost jobs, weaker exports, and, ultimately, a reduced ability to sustain imperial power. That is why he urged Britain to treat tariffs as “the big revolver” and use them to “force a fair trade policy upon the nations.”

Chamberlain defended this posture as a matter of survival. He warned that Britain’s “crowded population” could not “exist for a single day” if the country were “cut adrift” from the “natural markets” that sustained British trade. In his view, defending industry at home was the condition for remaining powerful abroad.

Opponents attacked tariffs as “stomach taxes” that would raise food prices and the cost of living, but Chamberlain claimed to trust his “little common sense” more than economics. For him, tariff reform was not about technical efficiency, but about a signal to defend his country in a hostile world.

Despite his charisma, Britain fully moved toward protectionism only in the interwar years, after the U.S. Smoot–Hawley tariffs (1930), which raised duties on thousands of imports and triggered counter-tariffs abroad. Chamberlain’s dream arrived late, and it arrived in a harsher world than the one he claimed he wanted to prevent.

The same sense of revenge drives foreign policy

Once leaders see the world as ruled by pressure and threats, foreign policy turns to “splendid isolation,” where national strength matters more than cooperation.

Chamberlain saw foreign policy as an extension of economic power. He argued that Britain should bind its empire together through trade, favoring imperial markets over foreign ones. He also believed that great powers should organize the world into stable blocs of influence rather than rely on open competition. In this spirit, Chamberlain wanted to ally with Germany, but they doubted about Britain’s ability to commit credibly because elections could reverse policy. Instead, they chose Russia.

Chamberlain often claimed to support peace, but he believed peace required strength. Early on, he opposed certain colonial wars and sounded like an isolationist. Later, he supported the Boer Wars. He attacked the Gladstone government for granting the Boers self-government, calling the result humiliating. In his telling, British “generosity” looked like fear, pushing the Boers to ignore “the overwhelming force which could have been brought against them,” and to “add some measure of contempt to the dislike they already cherished to the English.”

Chamberlain and Trump share the same instinct: strong with the weak, softer with the strong. They perceive a world divided into spheres of influence as an opportunity for their declining country to become strong again at the expense of their allies, while aggressively taking revenge against the enemy. Joseph Chamberlain’s son, Neville, continued the dream of his father, but he ended up giving Hitler what he wanted. Will Trump do the same with Putin and Xi?

The Victorian episode also offers a warning. Tariffs didn’t restore Britain’s lost lead. They intensified partisan conflicts and helped normalize treating compromise as weakness and outsiders as enemies. The world that followed grew harsher, not safer. And rather than Make Britain Great Again, the British Empire collapsed.