Corn Laws Research Articles

From the Corn Laws to Free Trade. Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective

Britain's shift to free trade in the mid-19th century was an important part of the British experience, being the first country to industrialise. A growing part of the population became dependent on imported food, at the same time as Britain's share of the world manufacturing output rose steeply. The workers and also the industrialists developed an interest in cheap imported grain, and this led to a repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws. The focal question for Schonhardt-Bailey is why this happened. The course of events is well known. In the late 1830s, a movement against the Corn Laws started in England: the Anti-Corn Law Association (later, the Anti-Corn Law League). The League organised a nation-wide and far-reaching propaganda campaign. The Conservatives had won the election in 1841, but in the following years the free trade supporters tried—successfully—to register as many electors as possible, and at the same time to challenge protectionist electors. However, before the next election (to be held in 1848), the Conservatives split, and a large group followed Prime Minister Robert Peel, and voted against the Corn Laws in early 1846. The ‘Peelites’ were not a majority among the Conservatives, but they changed the balance of power.

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey. From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Pp. xiii+426. $47.50 (cloth).

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey. From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Pp. xiii+426. $47.50 (cloth). - Volume 46 Issue 4

Response to Richard Peet

I wish to begin by thanking Dick for his generous comments on my attempt to unearth the local origins of the free trade doctrine, which Britain globalised in the name of Corn Law repeal, beginning in 1846. As he intimates, the issues he raises are ones that I have given considerable thought to. In these comments, I will pick up on the two issues he would emphasise differently (in his view, the greater significance of London-based British political economists, by comparison to Manchester-based cotton textile capitalists; and the ideological construction of knowledge, rather than the spatiality of knowledge production), but let me begin by noting some fundamental points of agreement. The logical foundation for free trade rooted in Ricardo and Torrens is indeed, in his words, 'wrong from the beginning'. A critique of the logical claims of this 200-year line of thinking, and its grounding in self-evidently false assumptions about the socio-spatial organisation of capitalism, is at the centre of my own analysis (cf. Sheppard 2005, 154-6). Almost two decades ago, with Trevor Barnes, I argued from a Marxian perspective that trade and uneven development are inextricably connected even in the absence of the powerasymmetries that enabled Britain (and more recently the US, and now China) to rig trade to the advantage of elites, and indirectly also at times workers, in these countries (Sheppard and Barnes 1990). We are also in agreement that national interest was key to the implementation of the free trade doctrine, that comparative advantage is a social construct (in this case, a consequence of the ability of mercantilist Britain to ruin India's sophisticated cotton textile and clothing industry, creating the conditions of possibility for the success of the Manchester cotton barons), and that Portugal was just the first of many places to suffer the opposite of what advocates claimed would be a rising tide of free trade that lifts all boats. Any challenge of the hegemonic and taken-for-granted status of the free trade doctrine must deconstruct

From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas and Institutions in Historical Perspective

From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas and Institutions in Historical Perspective

Practical economics in eighteenth-century England: Charles Smith on the grain trade and the corn laws, 1756?72

This article examines the role of the writings of Charles Smith in the eighteenth-century debates about the corn laws and the corn trade. Smith stood in between enlightenment theory on the grain trade and its practical application and results. Although his writings are known by economic historians, attention has focused solely on his estimates of wheat consumption, rather than on his economic ideas and their influence. He advocated a pragmatic approach to change, factoring into his analyses regional differences, popular hostility to technical and commercial innovation, the significance of traditional institutions such as the assize of bread, and the limits of ‘market integration’.

From the corn laws to free trade: interests, ideas and institutions in historical perspective – By Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

From the corn laws to free trade: interests, ideas and institutions in historical perspective – By Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

Agricultural Interests, Trade Adjustment and Repeal of the Corn Laws

In the 1840s, agricultural preferences on trade fluctuated between unity around protection and sector-based splits. Political economists have struggled to explain this pattern, because they have relied on the standard economic models of the domestic distribution of the gains from trade. The standard models depict interests in stable and exclusive terms, making them ill-suited for explaining change. I employ a new economic model—one designed to link the macroeconomic effect of trade with the microeconomic changes involved in adjustment—to highlight the risks landowners faced during adjustment. Landowners would support trade liberalisation only when these risks declined. The timing and nature of Peel's actions make sense as efforts to ease agricultural adjustment, thus exposing the latent sector-based cleavage in agriculture, observed economically as well as politically.

MICHAEL J. TURNER. Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 2004. Pp. 315. $97.95

Although the title might suggest a grander project, Michael J. Turner's book essentially provides a biographical and thematic account of the ideological trajectory of a self-defined “independent radical,” together with some insight into the causes celebres of mid-nineteenth-century radicalism and their relation to the broader political currents of the period. His subject is Thomas Peronnet Thompson, whose career as a radical spanned the era from the political turmoil of the immediate post-Napoleonic War period, to the campaign for the 1867 Reform Act—a time during which he was actively involved in the struggle for parliamentary reform, the Anti-Corn Law League, “sensible” Chartism, and agitation relating to the conduct, or misconduct, of British foreign policy. From 1829 to 1836 Thompson was joint owner and editor of the Westminster Review, and, at one time or another, he came into contact with most of the leading radicals of the mid-century period, most notably Jeremy Bentham, John Bowring, Richard Cobden, and John Bright. During his time at the Westminster Review he wrote more than a hundred articles on literature, music, religion, mathematics, military tactics, education, mechanics, parliamentary reform, jurisprudence, and, in particular, political economy. His idée fixe was free trade and Corn Law repeal, and it was his proselytizing zeal, directed to that end, and, the publication of his Cathecism on the Corn Laws (1827), that both brought him to national prominence and helped “shape the anti-Corn Law creed and its theoretical and tactical components” (p. 28).

The Economist et la controverse sur les brevets, 1850-1875

The opening of Great Exhibition of 1851 coincided with the start of a long debate on the law of patents. The question was whether patents were an encouragement to economic development or a hindrance. For The Economist which had been founded a few years earlier in the wake of the debate on the Corn Laws, the straightforward answer was that they were a hindrance and should be abolished. This article examines the arguments used by The Economist and shows that its analysis technological progress in the Victorian industry foreshadowed some of today’s concerns.

Power, Money, and Trade: Decisions That Shape Global Economic Relations

Acknowledgements Note to Instructors Introduction: Themes and Goals Part I: Approaches to International Relations 1. Competing Theories and the Evolution of Paradigms 2. The Levels of Analysis - System-Level Arguments 3. Theories from the National or Domestic Level 4. Bureaucratic Politics 5. Theories Based on the Idiosyncratic Characteristics of Individuals 6. Ideas as Causal Factors Part II: The Politicization of International Economic Issues Introduction: The Interplay of Power and Wealth 7. The Politics of Trade 8. The Politics of International Monetary Relations 9. The Politics of International Investment Part III: Turning Points in Foreign Economic Policy Behaviour 10. Britain's Repeal of the Corn Laws 11. The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty 12. Sir John A. Macdonald and the Introduction of Canada's National Policy 13. The Failure of Caprivi's New Course: Imperial Germany Defects from the Free Trade Regime 14. Britain's Refusal to Retaliate on Tariffs, 1906-1911 15. The Reciprocity Election in Canada, 1911 16. Britain's Return to the Gold Standard After World War I 17. The Passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff 18. The Creation of the Bretton Woods Monetary Regime 19. South Korea Opts for Export-Oriented-Industrialization 20. The Collapse of the Bretton Woods Monetary Regime 21. Brazil's Responses to the Debt Crisis 22. Canada and the Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. 23. Japan, International Monetary Responsibilities, and Policy Coordination: The Louvre and Plaza Accords 24. Germany's Role in European Monetary Union 25. Mahathir, Financial Crisis, and Malaysia's Capital Controls Conclusion: Theories, Evidence, and the Evolution of the International Political Economy Glossary Bibliography Index

How TRIPs Got Legs: Copyright, Trade Policy, and the Role of Government in Nineteenth-Century American Economic Thought

The cause of free trade was advanced successfully in Britain to achieve the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the removal of other tariffs in Gladstone’s budget of 1853, and the CobdenChevalier treaty of 1860. It was advanced much less successfully in postbellum America, where protection reigned until 1913. The cause is advanced today in the Doha-round negotiations of the World Trade Organization and, in the Western Hemisphere, in the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas and several subregional and bilateral preferential trade agreements. Or is it not? The WTO and FTAA negotiations have stalled repeatedly – most recently at the failed Cancun WTO talks of September 2003 – because of the vastly different agendas of developing and developed countries. Developing countries press for the dismantling of rich countries’ antidumping laws and of their protection of agriculture and cotton goods. Developed countries, particularly the United States, press for not only for access to poor countries’ markets, but also for their acceptance of stricter definitions and greater enforcement of intellectual property rights. The chapter concerning TRIPs (Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property rights) was included in the WTO agreement at the conclusion of the Uruguay Round of the GATT; since that time the United States has been seeking tougher provisions. While the U.S. relented in Cancun (Bhagwati 2004, p. 57), it did so while simultaneously pursuing regional and bilateral agreements that are more forceful. Intellectual property provokes the ire of globalization’s critics: it entails monopoly rents that accrue to producers of pharmaceuticals, some agricultural goods, and entertainment and media products, most of which producers reside in rich countries. Proponents view the rents as

A Canadian Dilemma

Whether to think of Canada primarily in its relationship with the United States or as open to the whole world is a dilemma for Canadians and for Canadian society as a whole. Canadian governments' actions at any time are likely to be determined by conflicting interests and pressures of the moment on specific issues.1 The perspective attributable to Canadian society is broader and deeper and may be expected to develop and change slowly over time. So I shall attempt to address the question in a long-term historical perspective.TWO ORIENTATIONSHistorical scholarship shows two conflicting orientations of Canada to the world. They can be represented in geographic terms as an east-west perspective and a north-south perspective. Donald Creightoris work gave a firm basis to the east-west conception of Canada's place in the world. The commercial empire of the St. Lawrence that he wrote about was its first manifestation-the linkage between the production of the great plains of the west, the financial and commercial interests of Montreal, and the transatlantic markets of Britain and Europe, tied in also with the commerce of the Caribbean.2 This perspective, though expressed in economic terms, was not a product of economic determinism. It was as much political and cultural. It reflected the option that created Canada with a strong central government designed to bind the broad extent of the country together and to defend it against incursion from the rising world power to the south. The war of 1812 was as vivid in the minds of Canadians in the years of Confederation as the beginnings of the Cold War are in ours, and at the very time of Confederation the Fenian raids into Canada reinforced that image. The British connection sustained defence of the new country. Transatlantic political and cultural ties as well as economic relations were vital to postConfederation Canada. This was Sir John A. Macdonald's vision of Canada.The north-south perspective was at first primarily a matter of economics but it has also had a significant political and cultural component. It emerged violently and abortively in 1849 in a short-lived annexationist movement led by the English-speaking merchants of Montreal who were the fulcrum in the grain trade between Canada and Britain. They were reacting in anger to Peel's repeal of the Corn Laws in Britain, which had given Canada a protected market for wheat. Adding insult to injury, these merchants and their supporters were enraged by the British crown's endorsement of responsible government, which threatened their local political dominance by giving due representation to the Francophone population. An Anglo mob in Montreal tossed refuse at the representative of the British monarchy and burned down the parliament buildings. Four of the principal English-language newspapers of Montreal supported annexation to the United States. Nothing much survived of this petulance.It was, however, in the 1890s that union with the United States gained a more sophisticated intellectual status thanks in part to the efforts of an Englishman, Goldwin Smith, who had settled in Toronto. Smith had been Regius Professor of modern history at Oxford where he expounded the liberal economic views of Cobden and Bright and contested ecclesiastical dominance in the university. A family tragedy, the suicide of his ailing father, interrupted his life in England and he resurrected his career across the Atlantic as one of the leading lights at the newly founded and secular Cornell University in upstate New York. From there he moved to Toronto where he married a wealthy widow, settled in the Grange, which after his death became the Art Gallery of Ontario, and animated an influential political and literary circle. He may have been the first to play the role of the public intellectual in English Canada.In the British liberal tradition he was anti-imperialist, mainly because of his profound belief in the Manchester school of economic liberalism. …

Constructing free trade: from Manchester boosterism to global management

The free trade doctrine, now global common knowledge, has followed a complex spatio‐temporal path of knowledge production from its origins in Manchester at the turn of the nineteenth century. While grounded in normative and cognitive claims, its transformation from local self‐interest to global doctrine was a result of the scale‐jumping tactics of the Anti‐Corn Law League, combined with the popularity in Western Europe of private property liberalism and the hegemonic global positionality of early nineteenth‐century Britain. Corn Law repeal in 1846 in London was constructed as the point in space–time where doctrine became practice, and Britain's subsequent prosperity was seen as proof of its validity. After 1880, except in Britain until 1914 and the colonies, performance belied the doctrine as progressive liberalism became influential, and import‐substituting industrialization an effective catch‐up strategy, for other nations. The free trade doctrine was reasserted, however, with the emergence of US hegemony, as a rationale for breaking up non‐US colonial preference systems and, more recently, neoliberalism. The free trade doctrine is now performed routinely under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. Nevertheless, it remains a local epistemology, whose truth‐like status is kept insulated from rigorous challenge by alternative epistemologies and practices.

Independent radicalism in early Victorian Britain

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introducing Independent Radicalism Making and Mobilizing Opinion: The Westminster Review and Reform The Corn Laws and the Politics of Free Trade Correcting the Chartists Liberty for Europe War and Peace Empire The End of Independent Radicalism Index

The Corn Laws and English wheat prices, 1815–1846

The British Corn Laws of the nineteenth century are the classic example of a trade barrier. This paper evaluates their importance to English society by analyzing the effects of the Corn Laws on wheat markets. Import supply elasticities are estimated for all of England's major grain supply markets, using data on prices, quantities, and freight costs from each country. A partial equilibrium trade arbitrage model is then constructed. In the absence of the Corn Laws, prices would have been 9 percent lower and consumption about 1.5 percent greater. The Corn Laws were, therefore, of great social and economic importance as England moved into the period of industrialization.

Cobden on freedom, peace, and trade

Every student of political economy knows that Adam Smith dealt mercantilist economic ideas a profound intellectual defeat in The Wealth of Nations (1776). The mercantilist had viewed economic interaction as a zero-sum game; that is, the benefit of one party had to come at the expense of the other. Sound economic policy, therefore, involved encouraging a favorable balance of trade (an excess of exports over imports), the acquisition of colonies, and the construction of a powerful navy to secure and maintain access to far-flung markets. Once Adam Smith and the classical economists had overthrown the mercantilist worldview in the eighteenth century, it was entirely natural that classical liberals would have expected peace to triumph to the extent that the new teaching became accepted. A philosophy that had viewed economic affairs as characterized by inherent conflict was increasingly giving way to one that emphasized mutual gain and the large-scale social cooperation of the international division of labor. As the various peoples and places of the world concentrated on producing those goods for which they enjoyed some advantage--or, as David Ricardo observed, even simply where they enjoyed the least disadvantage--the result would be greater wealth and a higher standard of living for everyone, as the entire world reaped the benefits of the particular advantages of a multiplicity of locales. In the nineteenth century, the great classical liberal Richard Cobden, the textile manufacturer and British politician who became famous through his campaign against the oppressive Corn Laws, developed this idea still further. The state's role in the spread of peace and freedom throughout the world was, in his judgment, very minimal. "The progress of freedom," he once said, "depends more upon the maintenance of peace and the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education than upon the labor of Cabinets or Foreign Offices." Cobden's philosophy had its roots in the previous century of European intellectual history. During the Enlightenment, thinkers impressed by the elegant regularity of phenomena and the beautiful order that Isaac Newton had described in the physical world looked in the social world for similar law-like relationships. And indeed, as Ludwig von Mises explains, the founders of political economy perceived "regularity in the operation of the market." People came to realize "with astonishment that human actions were open to investigation from other points of view than that of moral judgment. They were compelled to recognize a regularity which they

Ideology, Party and Interests in the British Parliament of 1841–47

Building upon Poole and Rosenthal’s NOMINATE technique and Kalt and Zupan’s residualization approach, I seek to disentangle the influences of constituency interests, party and ideology on the votes of MPs in the famous Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I argue that while the Conservative party shared a distinct ideology, it was also a coalition of two interests-based alliances. The non-Peelite Conservatives represented mostly (protectionist oriented) agricultural districts while the Peelites represented districts with more free trade leaning interests. Before 1846, Peelites voted according to a general Conservative ideology, but in 1846 an abrupt change occurred: the pivotal Peelites appear to have eschewed Conservative party unity and their own personal ideology in favour more of the preferences of their constituents. Repeal appears to have gained passage as these MPs switched from voting more as trustees to voting more as delegates.

A Specific‐Factors Model with Historical Application

In 1971, Ronald Jones examined a three‐factor two‐good model under the assumption that two of the factors are specific to one sector (a different sector for each such factor). Working independently, in the same year Paul Samuelson developed a similar framework. In this paper that specification is weakened, so that only one sector (agriculture) has a specific factor (land). When land is a separable input into food production, factor price‐equalization can no longer be shown, but Stolper–Samuelson magnification is still observed, although it is weakened. An application to the abolition of the corn laws is discussed.

Rational Choice and British Politics: An Analysis of Rhetoric and Manipulation from Peel to Blair. By Iain McLean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 256p. $65.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

In Rational Choice and British Politics, Iain McLean applies William Riker's concept of “heresthetics” to British political history. In contrast to rhetoric (the art of persuasion), heresthetics is “the art and science of political manipulation” (p. 10). Rather than trying to convince others of one's position, heresthetics is about transforming the question and altering political dimensions so as to change the rational calculus of key actors and manufacture a supportive coalition. McLean employs the device of “analytical narratives” (historical analysis informed by rational choice methodology) to explore critical junctures in British political development, including the repeal of the Corn Laws, the Second Reform Act, the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, and the political and economic revolution of Margaret Thatcher. He also explores broader political movements, including the realignment of Victorian political parties and the attempts by Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell to connect race and empire into winning coalitions.

Rational choice and British politics: an analysis of rhetoric and manipulation from Peel to Blair

1. Introduction 2. Irish Potatoes and British Politics: Peel, Wellington and the Repeal of the Corn Laws 3. Dishing the Whigs: Disraeli, Salisbury, and the relaunching of the Tory Party 1846-86 4. The great Victorian realignment 5. The failure of imperialism: Joseph Chamberlain and Enoch Powell 6. Lloyd George: supreme tactician and ambitious strategist 7. The patriot game: rhetoric and heresthetic in the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations of 1921 8. 'There is no alternative': Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair 9. Conclusion