Why trade flows are so enduring and hard to stop

What you'll learn

• 1 (00:03) **Introduction: The Enduring Patterns of Trade Warfare** - Host Peter Ferras frames the episode's core tension: the modern belief that today's trade conflicts are unique versus the historical reality that weaponizing trade is centuries old.
• 2 (01:37) **Guest Introduction: Ed Conway and His Historical Lens** - Ed Conway, economics editor for Sky News and author of *Trade World*, joins to discuss why looking at the micro-level of specific products reveals more than macro-economic models.
• 3 (05:12) **The Myth of Comparative Advantage: Ricardo's Abstract Theory** - Conway explains that David Ricardo developed his theory of comparative advantage as a pure abstraction, ignoring the messy trade wars and famines of his own era.
• 4 (09:16) **Edward III's Wool Embargo: The First Successful Trade War** - Conway details how 14th-century England, as the "Saudi Arabia of wool," used a 90% market share to coerce Flanders into an alliance during the Hundred Years' War.
• 5 (13:17) **Sanctions and the "Middlemen": Trade Finds a Way** - Conway uses the example of Range Rovers reaching Russia via Georgia to illustrate how sanctions are circumvented by an invisible layer of middlemen whose entire business is moving goods around barriers.
• 6 (20:37) **The Chinese Overcapacity Question: Is It Futile to Resist?** - Host Ferras asks whether the historical resilience of trade flows means it is futile for the West to try and stop the flood of cheap Chinese goods.
• 7 (24:46) **The First World War Lesson: Industrial Capacity as Insurance** - Conway draws a direct line from the UK's laissez-faire trade policy before 1914 to its desperate scramble for TNT and binoculars once war with Germany began.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app