studies have examined a single point in this triad. Scholars have shown how methodically liberals opposed democracy, defending a limited suffrage on the basis of education, and turning to an emphasis on economic over political liberties as socialist ideas spread after 1848.38 The concept of ‘empire’ has recently garnered more attention than in the past. Liberals are now acknowledged to have been deeply interested in the imperial project, even as debate rages over the nature of that interest, and whether it constituted a fundamental ‘urge’ or was liable to constant shifts and shadings.39 Recent histories of finance capitalism have added to our knowledge of the City of London, though they remain rather hesitant to credit an ideological perspective to the varied actors operating within it.40
The Economist, however, unlike particular thinkers or themes, offers a continuous record of the confrontation between classical liberalism and the challenges of democracy, empire, and finance across the better part of two centuries – and can claim far greater intellectual success than any other expression of liberalism, with a world-wide reach today. Reading it is an antidote to the standard eclecticism of most accounts of liberal ideas, whose effect has been to noyer le poisson, as the French say, adducing everything and its opposite in a grab-bag going back at least to Smith, if not to Locke or earlier. From the time when the term first truly became part of political discourse, the paper has pressed imperturbably forward under the banner of liberalism – sometimes a little ahead of ideological shifts, at others a little behind them. What the history of the Economist reveals 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.
