I recently finished writing a review of a book with “conspiracy” in the title, and it led me to muse a little bit about how historians process moments in history when accusations of conspiracy were made and moments when there is evidence a conspiracy occurred. The book, Marc-William Palen’s The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896, contains a bit of both, although one of Palen’s main arguments (signaled by the inverted commas around “conspiracy”) is that the free trade conspiracy that protectionists alleged existed in the U.S. during the Gilded Age was wholly Read more