universities of Oxford and Cambridge,
and a disproportionate number of the
most important editors have come
from just one Oxford college, Mag
dalen. “Lack of diversity is a benefit,”
Gideon Rachman, a former editor who
is now a columnist at the Financial
Times, told Zevin, explaining that it
produces an assertive and coherent
point of view. Indeed, contributors are
not shy about adding prescription (how
to fix India’s power problems, say) to
their reporting and analysis. The pieces
are mostly short, but the coverage is
comprehensive; a single issue might
cover the insurgency in south Thai
land, public transportation in Jakarta,
commodities prices, and recent ad
vances in artificial intelligence. This
air of crisp editorial omniscience in
sures that the magazine is as likely to
be found on an aspirant think tanker’s
iPad in New Delhi as it is on Bill Gates’s
private jet.
Zevin, having evidently mastered
the magazine’s archives, commands a
deep knowledge of its inner workings
and its historical connection to polit
ical and economic power. He shows
how its editors and contributors pio
neered the revolving doors that link
media, politics, business, and finance—
alumni have gone on to such jobs as
deputy governor of the Bank of En
gland, Prime Minister of Britain, and
President of Italy—and how such peo
ple have defined, at crucial moments
in history, liberalism’s everchanging
relationship with capitalism, imperial
ism, democracy, and war.
A capsule version of this thesis can
be found in the career of James Wil
son, The Economist’s founder and first
editor. Wilson, who was born in Scot
land and became the owner of a strug
gling hatmaking business, intended his
journal to develop and disseminate the
doctrine of laissezfaire—“nothing but
pure principles,” as he put it. He was
particularly vociferous in his opposi
tion to the Corn Laws, agricultural
tariffs that were unpopular with mer
chants. The Corn Laws were repealed
in 1846, three years after the magazine
first appeared, and Wilson began to
proselytize more energetically for free
trade and the increasingly prominent
discipline of economics. He became a
Member of Parliament and held sev
eral positions in the British govern
ment. He also founded a panAsian
bank, now known as Standard Char
tered, which expanded fast on the back
of the opium trade with China. In 1859,
Wilson became Chancellor of the In
dian Exchequer. He died in India the
following year, trying to reconfigure
the country’s financial system.
During his short career as a jour
nalistcumcrusader, Wilson brisklyclarified what he meant by “pure prin
ciples.” He opposed a ban on trading
with slaveholding countries on the
ground that it would punish slaves as
well as British consumers. In the eigh
teenforties, when Ireland was struck
with famine, which was largely caused
by free trade—the British insisted on
exporting Irish food, despite cata
strophic crop failure—Wilson called
for a homeopathic remedy: more free
trade. With Irish intransigence becom
ing a nuisance, he advised the British
to respond with “powerful, resolute, but
just repression.” Wilson was equally
stern with those suffering from rising
inequality at home. In his view, the
government was wrong to oblige rail
companies to provide better service for
workingclass passengers, who were
hitherto forced to travel in exposed
freight cars: “Where the most profit is
made, the public is best served. Limit
the profit, and you limit the exertion
of ingenuity in a thousand ways.” A
factory bill limiting women to a twelve
hour workday was deemed equally per
nicious. As for public schooling, com
mon people should be “left to provide
education as they provide food for
themselves.”
The Economist held that, “if the pur
suit of selfinterest, left equally free for
all, does not lead to the general wel
fare, no system of government can ac
complish it.” But this opposition to
government intervention, it turned out,
did not extend to situations in which
liberalism appeared to be under threat.
In the eighteenfifties, Zevin writes,
the Crimean War, the Second Opium
War, and the Indian Mutiny “rocked
British liberalism at home and recast
it abroad.” Proponents of free trade had
consistently claimed that it was the
best hedge against war. However, Brit
ain’s expansion across Asia, in which
free trade was often imposed at gun
point, predictably provoked conflict,
and, for The Economist, wherever Brit
ain’s “imperial interests were at stake,
war could become an absolute neces
sity, to be embraced.”
This betrayal of principle alienated,
among others, the businessman and
statesman Richard Cobden, who had
helped Wilson found The Economist,
and had shared his early view of free
trade as a guarantee of world peace.