Fighting British Imperialism by Spreading the “American System” Internationally

Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress, From Franklin to Kennedy Volume II 1830s-1890s

By Anton Chaitkin (2025)

Book Review

(Part 4)

During 19th century, there was a continued effort by US supporters of the “American System” of political economy to spread their ideas and technology to other countries – seeking international support in ending British imperial domination over global trade and economics.

Matthew Carey’s son Henry and his Philadelphia supporters payed a major role in shaping political revolutions in both Germany and Japan, as well aa reinvigorating Ireland’s battle for independence. They helped organize donations of cash and guns to the Irish republicans, ultimately leading to the formation of Sinn Fein.

It was largely thanks to their efforts that Chancellor Otto von Bismark ended the free trade agreement agreement with Britain, which was destroying the economies of the independent German principalities and unified Germany as a sovereign nation state in 1871.

Henry Carey had first sponsored German immigrant Frederich List to return to Germany in the 1820s and 1830s, were he helped develop the Zollverein (a protective tariff union of German principalities) List also met with Count Camillo Cavour, who was battling for Italian unification.

Under Bismark, protective tariffs would become permanent national policy. The chancellor also enacted unemployment compensation and pensions, as well as intensifying state sponsorship of education, infrastructure development and electrification.

Thanks to huge federal support for the “American System” under Lincoln, Grant and Hayes, after 1880 the US became the global number one industrial power, with Germany becoming number two

In response the British and Hapsburg oligarchy panicked and concocted the Austrian school of ultra free market (and anti-tariff economics) under Frederich von Hayek, a close associate of Otto von Hapsburg and other Hapsburg nobility.*

Russia had a link to “American System” supporters dating back to the visits of Pennsylvania colony envoy Benjamin Franklin. During the Civil War, Alexander II sent naval vessels to the US Atlantic and Pacific Coast to thwart British and French efforts to invade the US Mexico (in support Of the Confederacy). In return, the Lincoln administration sent US engineers (and US-produced locomotives) to Russia to assist in the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. After meeting up with Carey’s associates at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1875, Russian envoy Dmitri Mendeleev returned to Russia to fight for full scale industrialization.

In 1852-54, Commodore Perry undertook the first US expeditions to Japan, opening the country to the outside world after 200 years of isolation. Influenced by the US Civil War, the Japanese overthrew their feudal warlords in 1868 and established their first national bank in 1873. Under President Grant, Ambassador John Bingham achieved the revocation of the universal treaties (imposed by Western powers) that prohibited Japan from enacting protective tariffs. He also supported new laws that freed Japanese serfs and compelled warlords to sell their lands and gave them loans to become industrialists.

During this period the British were covertly building Japan’s naval fleet and engineering a Japanese attack on Russia. In 1904 Anglophile Wall Street banker colluded with the UK foreign office in financing the 19 month Russo-Japanese War. The latter would effectively end the strategic US-Russia alliance against British imperial strategy. Thirteen years later Schiff would also help finance, via Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik Revolution. See Who Financed the Bolshevik Revolution?

*They also supported the work of Fredrick Engels, a vocal free trade advocate who viciously attacked Frederick List, as well as Karl Marx, also an enthusiastic free trader. See https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1847/06/01.htm and https://libcom.org/library/on-free-trade-karl-marx