Zero-sum thinking as the cause of war

From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 37.

British opinion divided on whether the swelling tide of American merchant vessels was a good thing or a bad thing. A few radical members of Parliament regularly rose from the Whig party’s opposition benches to praise all things American. Samuel Whitbread, whose successful brewing business had made him a fortune—and an emblem of the self-made man who was beginning to challenge the landed aristocracy’s traditional hold on power—declared that he viewed America’s successful Revolution with “reverence and admiration,” and made clear he welcomed American progress on any and all fronts as a boon to humankind.

Others saw perfectly practical reasons to welcome America’s growing commercial prosperity. America was the market for half of Britain’s textile exports in 1806, a third of all her exported goods—worth some $50 million a year. America, for her part, supplied Britain with the wheat she needed to feed herself, shipping twice as much as the rest of the world combined, along with some fifty million tons of cotton a year to keep her mills running. Anticipating free-trade arguments that would take nearly two centuries to become commonplace, the Scottish Whig politician Henry Brougham argued that trying to protect traditional British monopolies on the oceangoing trade only hurt Britain’s prosperity in the long run; the American shipping trade provided an outlet for British manufactures and put money in the pockets of Britain’s best customers. “Can any but the veriest driveller in political science, doubt for a moment that her gains are our gains,” Brougham wrote of America in 1808, “… that the less she traded with other nations, the less she will trade with ourselves; and that to confine her foreign commerce to her trade with England, would be to diminish, if not to destroy this trade also.”

That was a compelling argument for many of Britain’s emerging industrial class. But it was the “drivellers” who spoke far louder, clinging to a traditional view that equated the strength of Great Britain with her hegemony of the seas, pure and simple: British merchantmen no less than the Royal Navy were why Britannia ruled the waves. Shipbuilders, shipowners, and the trades that supplied them formed a powerful bloc that violently opposed any concessions to rival trading nations, and in particular any weakening of the Navigation Acts, which barred non-English ships from carrying goods to or from English colonies. They noted with alarm that America had already elbowed aside Britain in the trade between the two countries; British tonnage engaged in that transatlantic commerce had plummeted from 72,000 to 14,000, and there was no end to America’s appetite for more. “Our liberality was but that of the prodigal who gives without return,” declared Lord Sheffield, a venerable proponent of the Navigation Acts. America’s gains, insisted the traditionalists, inescapably were Britain’s losses.