No sooner had the cause of Free Trade triumphed in 1846 than it became the subject of an elaborate and evolving historiography. The historical accounts and the primary sources for the Repeal campaign themselves, reveal that the victory of Free Trade was seen not as a product of economic arguments or of the influence of economists but rather as a social and political event that grew out of class politics and employed a range of non-economic arguments and rhetoric. After a lull in the 1870s and early 1880s, this kind of account grew in force in the later nineteenth century and the 1900s, culminating in the controversy over Tariff Reform after 1903. In that, Free Trade (always capitalised as was Protection) was seen as a wider social and political principle with many associations, and not just an argument for economic efficiency. The rival Protectionist case had a similar quality. The cause of Free Trade found expression in popular culture and a particular way of conceiving British identity and culture, in an early example of ‘metapolitics’. All of this should lead us to reassess not only the history but also the place of arguments about trade policy in our own time and to move away from the technical and ‘value-free’ economic ones. The movement we can see after 1931 from Free Trade to free trade, which reflected the triumph of protectionism in 1931 and the new trade regime created after 1945 should lead us also to be more sceptical about the trade policies of the last 70 years and the last 30 years in particular.