Theoretical and methodological reflections on economic interdependence and war

What causes peace? Dale Copeland’s detailed and ambitious book, Economic Interdependence and War, has an answer. At least under certain conditions, the ties that bind nations together in webs of commerce can lead them to prefer to avoid, or at least delay, active conflict. The basic claim of a commercial peace is hardly new. Scholars like Montesquieu and Smith detailed this connection at the dawn of the commercial age. Two features make the book distinctive and might be said to advance this timely and important research agenda. First, Copeland sets out to integrate ideas of a negative commercial peace that originated in liberal internationalist theory into a Realist neoclassical framework. Two lines of thinking about world affairs that were dialectical may perhaps have reached a synthesis. To achieve this synthesis, Copeland emphasizes prospective thinking about commerce by leaders in evaluating their nations’ foreign security policy: It is the anticipation of trade, rather than its mere concurrence, that Copeland deems critical in achieving major power peace. Second, the book is broad and ambitious in its empirical scope as well as its theoretical domain, offering panoramic analyses of eras more akin to period narratives than to the narrowly focused vignettes that are common in the social sciences.