Magnanimous albion: Free trade and British national income, 1841–1881

Abstract

During the forty years from Peel’s to Gladstone’s second ministry the commercial policy of the United Kingdom moved decisively from fettered to free trade. National income rose decisively as well, the income of labor with it. It was no surprise to free traders, of course, that the removal of a pernicious tax on enterprise, most particularly on the enterprise of industrial laborers and capitalists, brought with it greater wealth for all. They were even willing to concede that only a portion of the greater wealth, though a substantial portion, was attributable to free trade. After all, it was not the promise of material well being alone that buoyed their spirits in the struggle against protection. Their spiritual leader, Cobden, saw far beyond cheaper corn and better markets for British cotton textiles; he saw, indeed, “in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe-drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.“’ Such cosmopolitan visions dimmed in later controversy, for, unlike the material promise, they had all too plainly not been fulfilled. Later critics of free trade, such as the “fair trade” historian, William Cunningham, could in the 1900s emphasize the * This essay was born in 1971 and has led since then a life of seminars and conferences, accumulating at them a long list of intellectual debts. The institutional debts are to the meetings of the Econometric Society in 1971, and to seminars at the Universities of Chicago,