1. An open and unrestricted trade.
1606. Chapman, M. D’Olive, I. Wit’s become a free trade for all sorts to live by.
1622. Malynes, Maint. Free Trade, 105. So easie Remedie, whereby the Kingdome shall enioy all the three essential parts of Traffique vnder good and Politike Gouernment, which will bee Free Trade effectually or in deed.
1642–3. Earl of Newcastle, Declar., in Rushw., Hist. Coll. (1721), V. 137. As if they desired not only the free Trade, but even the Monopoly of plundering to themselves.
1670. R. Coke, Disc. Trade, 33. Our Plantations and Ireland too would have been much increased and inriched by a Free Trade, more than by this restraint.
1804. Edin. Rev., IV. July, 308. The wisdom of allowing a free trade has been pretty generally allowed in speculation by all statesmen, politicians and merchants, ever since the publication of the Wealth of Nations.
1846. McCulloch, Acc. Brit. Empire (1854), II. 527. It is not, therefore, to the fact of a country being a colony that we are to ascribe the circumstance of our carrying on a great free trade with it; but to the fact of our being able to supply it, or of its being able to supply us, with one or more articles or products in considerable demand on cheaper terms than it or they can be supplied from any other quarter.
2. Trade or commerce left to follow its natural course, i.e., without the interference of customs duties designed to restrict imports or of bounties intended to foster home production. Also, the legislative establishment or maintenance of this state of things, and the principles of those who advocate it; opposed to protection.
Adam Smith, W. N., 1776, uses freedom of trade in this sense. He has also frequently a free trade, in sense 1.
1823. in Cobbett, Rur. Rides (1885), I. 400. One newspaper says, that Mr. Huskisson is gone to Paris, and thinks it likely that he will endeavour to ‘inculcate in the mind of the Bourbons wise principles of free trade!’
1825. M’Culloch, Pol. Econ., II. ii. 134. Suppose that, under a system of free trade, we imported a considerable proportion of silks and linens now wholly manufactured at home.
1861. Cobden, in Times, 18 July. The principles of Free Trade.
b. In various occasional applications (see quots.).
1858. Simmonds, Dict. Trade, Free-trade … unrestricted action in banking operations.
1868. Rogers, Pol. Econ., xvii. (1876), 231. Correctly stated, free trade in land consists rather in the removal of the hindrances which the law puts on the conveyance of land.
3. Trade free from the lawful customs duties; smuggling.
1824. Scott, Redgauntlet, ch. xiii. ‘If you will do nothing for the free trade, I must patronise it myself.’ So saying, he took a large glass of brandy.
1834. H. Miller, Scenes & Leg., xiv. (1876), 211. [He] was engaged … in the free trade, and … had set the officers of the revenue at defiance.
4. attrib.
1829. H. Hawthorn, Visit Babylon, 45. In all this, do you … discover anything like your free-trade plan?
1877. Daily News, 5 Oct., 4/4. The free-trade party.
So Free-trading a., favoring free-trade; Free-tradist, an advocate of free-trade.
1832. Galt, in Fraser’s Mag., VI. 593. To the theory of the free-tradist objections cannot well be made, for the truths from which it is deduced are as indestructible as the radical principles of the rights of man, and as impracticable, too, in the present state of society, and the condition of the communities into which the world is divided.
1851. Lytton, Lett. John Bull, 93. To sum up the authorities from Free-trading political economists that I have arrayed on the side of justice to the land.
