SOCIAL SCIENTIST to the theoretical underpinnings of analysis relating to these trade liberalized systems. Then we will discuss, again briefly, at the costs paid by the other developing countries which in the last two decades have followed a liberal trade and investment regime and finally look at the specific results and future implications for the Indian economy of the current 'free trade' regime. It is often accepted as an unquestioned truism by economists, including economists from developing ex-colonized countries, that the freest possible international trade, is necessarily a good thing for everyone participating in that trade. For over two centuries now the ideology of free trade has been so thoroughly dinned into the heads of students, via the textbooks and in today's world also via the conventional wisdom filtering through the print and electronic media, that any systematic alternative viewpoint which stresses the costs of 'free trade' is hardly ever encountered. The ideology of free trade dates back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and it is no accident that both theorists should be from Britain and have written at a time when that country was in the process of grasping the land and resources of other civilizations, and launching on the world's first Industrial Revolution after creating a conducive economic environment for it by forbidding its colonies to manufacture anything and forcing them to specialize in producing the wage goods and raw materials its own industry needed. Neither theorist was English, for Smith was a Scotsman while Ricardo's forebears came originally from Spain. Yet both were the quintessential theorists of the emerging manufacturing bourgeoisie in Britain in the last quarter of the 18th century and the first quarter of the 19th century respectively. The free trade that they advocated has been much misunderstood; it was the freeing of British trade from its own monopoly trading companies, but very much while retaining control of subjugated colonies; hence the freedom to Britain to continue to industrialize at the expense of other nations and peoples, and definitely not a general freedom for any potential rival to do likewise. Thus Adam Smith, in a passage in The Wealth of Nations which is never quoted, strongly opposed the idea of North America developing its own manufactures rather than relying on importing manufactures from Europe: It has been the principal cause of the rapid progress of our American colonies towards wealth and greatness that almost their whole capitals have been employed in agriculture. They have no manufactures, those household and coarser manufactures excepted which... are the work of the women and the children in every private family. The greater