Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 32 581–582 2007 ISSN 0020 -2754 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Commentary Response to Richard Peet Eric Sheppard Department of Geography, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA email: shepp001@umn.edu revised manuscript received 29 May 2007 I wish to begin by thanking Dick for his generous comments on my attempt to unearth the local origins of the free trade doctrine, which Britain globalised in the name of Corn Law repeal, beginning in 1846. As he intimates, the issues he raises are ones that I have given considerable thought to. In these comments, I will pick up on the two issues he would emphasise differently (in his view, the greater significance of London-based British political economists, by comparison to Manchester-based cotton textile capitalists; and the ideological construction of knowledge, rather than the spatiality of knowledge production), but let me begin by noting some fundamental points of agreement. The logical foundation for free trade rooted in Ricardo and Torrens is indeed, in his words, ‘wrong from the beginning’. A critique of the logical claims of this 200-year line of thinking, and its grounding in self-evidently false assumptions about the socio-spatial organisation of capitalism, is at the centre of my own analysis (cf. Sheppard 2005, 154–6). Almost two decades ago, with Trevor Barnes, I argued from a Marxian perspective that trade and uneven development are inextricably connected – even in the absence of the power- asymmetries that enabled Britain (and more recently the US, and now China) to rig trade to the advantage of elites, and indirectly also at times workers, in these countries (Sheppard and Barnes 1990). We are also in agreement that national interest was key to the implementation of the free trade doctrine, that comparative advantage is a social construct (in this case, a consequence of the ability of mercantilist Britain to ruin India’s sophisticated cotton textile and clothing industry, creating the conditions of possibility for the success of the Manchester cotton barons), and that Portugal was just the first of many places to suffer the opposite of what advocates claimed would be a rising tide of free trade that lifts all boats. Any challenge of the hegemonic and taken-for-granted status of the free trade doctrine must deconstruct its theoretical and empirical claims from the inside out, and this paper seeks to make a small contribution to this critique. My position on Dick’s first difference of emphasis is shaped by my reading of others’ studies of the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL). I agree that the free trade doctrine promoted by the ACLL was rooted within an eighteenth and early nineteenth- century Scottish and English tradition of moral economy and political economy that took a distinctly Lockean attitude toward liberalism as founded in individual liberty, property ownership and the market (Sheppard 2005, 161–2), a position that British political economists indeed avidly promoted in and around London. These experts argue, however, that Ricardo’s (Ricardo 1821) recently published case for comparative advantage was studiously ignored by the ACLL as too controversial, precisely because it highlighted class conflict over the economic surplus (cf. Hinde 1987; Semmel 1970; Sheppard 2005, 159; Winch 1996). Further, initial attempts to get the ACLL off the ground in 1836 in London, where Ricardo and his fellow travellers were concentrated, failed. Resolution of this difference of opinion must await a close study of the archives of the ACLL, and of Parliamentary debates around Corn Law repeal. With respect to the second difference of emphasis, my position is based on how I theorise the emer- gence of class power. The turn of the nineteenth century was perhaps the key moment in the emergence to power of an industrial capitalist class in Britain, displacing landed classes, as the so-called industrial revolution was gathering steam (which is presumably