national interests while eschewing war and territorial expansion when free trading
interests triumph in the domestic political game.
The debates over abolishing the Corn Laws in Great Britain and the Walker tariff
in the United States played a critical role in the peaceful resolution to the Oregon dispute.
American merchant interests and southern cotton interests combined to block attempts by
Western senators to pressure President Polk into forcibly annexing all of the disputed
Oregon territory. At the same time, the possibility of a substantial and simultaneous
reduction of tariffs in both the United States and Great Britain forced politicians like Polk
and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Walker, to choose among competing political goals—
territorial expansion and free trade. For these key decision makers, the latter won out
over the former. In Great Britain, Robert Peel and Lord Aberdeen sought to use the
abolition of the Corn Laws to mollify expansionist sentiment in the United States and
construct an agreement whereby their government could escape war and withdraw from
pat of the Oregon territory with honor.
These claims emphasizing the capacity of free trade to promote peace between the
United States and Great Britain in the nineteenth century offers a unique opportunity to
explore the mechanisms by which international commerce promotes peace. Drawing
largely on quantitative research methods, multiple studies have shown that greater levels
of bilateral interdependence reduce the likelihood of military conflict between states (e.g.
Oneal and Russett 1997, 1999; Russett and Oneal 2001). Less attention has been devoted
to designing empirical tests that distinguish among multiple causal mechanisms offered
to explain this peace. This paper shifts the focus from interdependence between
economies to the domestic distributional effects of international commerce to understand
how globalization promotes peace.
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Convention