Free Ports in the Liberal Imagination: Evidence from <i>The Economist</i> and <i>The New York Times</i>, 1845–2010

This essay relies on an extensive database of articles from The Economist and The New York Times to track the contours of free port debate over time. A secondary aim (exploiting this database) is to map more fully the spatial and chronological bounds of the free port. A third, more tentative goal is to gauge how the free port functioned and why it became outmoded by the late twentieth century, as discourse about the free port gave way to a wider array of institutions such as the export processing zone and the special economic zone. Ultimately, we argue that the free port is best seen as a concomitant of Euro-American imperialism, whether viewed from the metropole or the colonies.