The Nineteenth-Century Corn Law Reconsidered

Abstract

Ihe British nineteenth-century Corn Laws only made sense on the assumption that there was an abundance of cheap corn in Europe which, in free trade conditions, would tend to flood the British market, undercutting British farmers and lowering the price of British bread. Many opponents of the Corn Laws (such as manufacturers wishing to cut wages and sell textiles cheaply abroad), agreed with the farmers about the probable results of free trade while disagreeing about their desirability.' However, this simple picture has been confused by later and more sophisticated free trade arguments which held that the Corn Laws could safely be abolished because foreign competition had been exaggerated and no cheap surplus was forthcoming. It is this version of the facts, apparently confirmed by the course of events after i846, which dominates modern historical thinking on the subject.2 Thus the Laws appear to have made little difference to British grain prices; the ability of contemporaries to understand their own affairs is discredited, and the whole Corn Law controversy is made to seem pointless and 'much ado about nothing'.3 The Laws are reduced to a symbol in the struggle between landlord and manufacturer, which could be ceremonially abolished to mark the victory of the latter.4 This is the more extraordinary in a world conditioned to restrictive practices, price supports and government controls of all kinds, whose effectiveness even their opponents do not usually deny. The chief purpose of this article is to vindicate both landlords and manufacturers and to show that until about i838 they really had grounds for a quarrel. At this time, and particularly between i8i9 and i826, there really was a glut of corn in Europe, which the Corn Laws kept back. But a subsidiary purpose is to show, paradoxically, that by the time the movement for repeal was getting seriously under way, after i838, important changes were occurring