Free Trade is an ambitious project by two artists well known for their inventive practice, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. Free Trade explores – via one of Manchester Art Gallery’s largest donated collections, the Beatson Blair Bequest – a complex web of relationships between a private passion for collecting art, public museum culture and deregulated economic expansion. In this moment in Victorian Manchester the project locates the origin of the awesome forces at play in our contemporary ‘global economy’. Free Trade features previously unpublished archive material, photographs of the gallery installation; rare lectures previously delivered in Manchester by John Ruskin (1857) and William Morris (1883). Includes essays by Julian Stallabrass, Dan Smith and Toby Nangle.