Corn Laws
The Corn Laws were tariffs and other trade restrictions on imported food and corn enforced in the United Kingdom between 1815 and 1846. The word corn in British English denotes all cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley. The laws were designed to keep corn prices high to favour domestic farmers, and represented British mercantilism. The Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn, initially by simply forbidding importation below a set price, and later by imposing steep import duties, making it too expensive to import it from abroad, even when food supplies were short. The House of Commons passed the corn law bill on 10 March 1815, the House of Lords on 20 March and the bill received royal assent on 23 March 1815.
The Corn Laws enhanced the profits and political power associated with land ownership. The laws raised food prices and the costs of living for the British public, and hampered the growth of other British economic sectors, such as manufacturing, by reducing the disposable income of the British public.
The laws became the focus of opposition from urban groups who had far less political power than rural areas. The first two years of the Great Famine in Ireland of 1845–1852 forced a resolution because of the urgent need for new food supplies. The prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, a Conservative, achieved repeal in 1846 with the support of the Whigs in Parliament, overcoming the opposition of most of his own party.
Economic historians see the repeal of the Corn Laws as a decisive shift towards free trade in Britain. According to one 2021 study, the repeal of the Corn Laws benefitted the bottom 90% of income earners in the United Kingdom economically, while causing income losses for the top 10% of income earners.
Origins
As a staple of life, as well as an important commodity of trade, corn and its traffic was long the subject of debate and of government regulation – the Tudors legislating against speculating in corn, and the Stuarts introducing import and export controls. Import had been regulated as early as 1670; and in 1689 traders were provided bounties for exporting rye, malt and wheat. In 1773, the ', "An act to regulate the importation and exportation of corn" repealed Elizabethan controls on grain speculation; but also shut off exports and allowed imports when the price was above 48 shillings per quarter. The issue however remained one of public debate into the 1790s; and amendments to the 1773 act, favouring agricultural producers, were made in both 1791 and 1804.In 1813, a House of Commons committee recommended excluding foreign-grown corn until the price of domestically grown corn exceeded 80 shillings per quarter, or the equivalent in 2025 prices of around £1,100 per tonne of wheat. The political economist Thomas Malthus believed this to be a fair price, and that it would be dangerous for Britain to rely on imported corn because lower prices would reduce labourers' wages, and manufacturers would lose out due to the decrease of purchasing power of landlords and farmers.
With the advent of peace when the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, corn prices decreased, and the Tory government of Lord Liverpool passed the ' to keep bread prices high. This resulted in serious rioting in London.
In 1816, the Year Without a Summer caused famine by disastrously reducing crop harvest. Reduced standard of living and food shortages led to riots. But the ceiling price of 80 shillings a quarter for domestic grain was so high that, between 1815 and 1848, it was never reached. David Ricardo, however, espoused free trade so that Britain could use its capital and population to its comparative advantage.
Opposition
In 1820, the Merchants' Petition, written by Thomas Tooke, was presented to the House of Commons. The petition demanded free trade and an end to protective tariffs. The prime minister, Lord Liverpool, who claimed to be in favour of free trade, blocked the petition. He argued, speciously, that complicated restrictions made it difficult to repeal protectionist laws. He added, though, that he believed Britain's economic dominance grew in spite of, not because of, the protectionist system. In 1821, the president of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, composed a Commons committee report which recommended a return to the "practically free" trade of the pre-1815 years.The ' decreed that corn could be imported when the price of domestically harvested corn rose to 80/– per quarter but that the import of corn would again be prohibited when the price fell to 70/– per quarter. After this act was passed, the corn price never rose to 80/– until 1828. In 1827, the landlords rejected Huskisson's proposals for a sliding scale, and during the next year Huskisson and the new prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, devised a new sliding scale for the ' whereby, when domestic corn was 52/– per quarter or less, the duty would be 34/8, and when the price increased to 73/–, the duty decreased to one shilling.
The Whig governments, in power for most of the years between 1830 and 1841, decided not to repeal the Corn Laws. However the Liberal Whig MP Charles Pelham Villiers proposed motions for repeal in the House of Commons every year from 1837 to 1845. In 1842, the majority against repeal was 303; by 1845 this had fallen to 132. Although he had spoken against repeal until 1845, Robert Peel voted in favour in 1846. In 1853, when Villiers was made a Privy Counsellor, The Times stated that "it was Mr Charles Villiers who practically originated the Free Trade movement".
In 1838, Villiers spoke at a meeting of 5,000 "working-class men" in Manchester. In 1840, under Villiers' direction, the Committee on Import Duties published a blue book examining the effects of the Corn Laws. Tens of thousands of copies were printed in pamphlet form by the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in 1838. The report was quoted in the major newspapers, reprinted in America, and published in an abridged form by The Spectator.
In the 1841 election, Sir Robert Peel became Prime Minister and Richard Cobden, a major proponent of free trade, was elected for the first time. Peel had studied the works of Adam Smith, David Hume and David Ricardo, and proclaimed in 1839: "I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes." He voted against repeal each year from 1837 to 1845. In 1842, in response to the Blue book published by Villiers' 1840 Committee on Import Duties, Peel offered a concession by modifying the sliding scale. He reduced the maximum duty to 20/– if the price were to fall to 51/– or less. In 1842, Peel's fellow-Conservative Monckton Milnes said, at the time of this concession, that Villiers was "the solitary Robinson Crusoe sitting on the rock of Corn Law repeal".
According to historian Asa Briggs, the Anti-Corn Law League was a large, nationwide middle-class moral crusade with a Utopian vision; its leading advocate Richard Cobden promised that repeal would settle four great problems simultaneously:
The landlords claimed that manufacturers like Cobden wanted cheap food so that they could reduce wages and thus maximise their profits, an opinion shared by socialist Chartists. Karl Marx said: "The campaign for the abolition of the Corn Laws had begun and the workers' help was needed. The advocates of repeal therefore promised, not only a Big Loaf but also the passing of the Ten Hours Bill". In 1876, Thomas Carlyle commented on John Bright, co-founder of the League along with Cobden: "as for that party, Bright, Cobden and Co., 'Cheap and Nasty' was their watchword. It was folly to suppose good things were to be had cheap. The nation had been deluded."
The Anti-Corn Law League was agitating peacefully for repeal. They funded writers like William Cooke Taylor to travel the manufacturing regions of northern England to research their cause. Taylor published a number of books as an Anti-Corn Law propagandist, most notably, The Natural History of Society, Notes of a tour in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire, and Factories and the Factory System. Cobden and the rest of the Anti-Corn Law League believed that cheap food meant greater real wages and Cobden praised a speech by a working man who said:
The magazine The Economist was founded in September 1843 by politician James Wilson with help from the Anti-Corn Law League; his son-in-law Walter Bagehot later became its editor.
Prelude to repeal
In February 1844, the Duke of Richmond initiated the Central Agricultural Protection Society to campaign in favour of the Corn Laws.In 1844, the agitation subsided as there were fruitful harvests. The situation changed in late 1845 with poor harvests and the Great Famine in Ireland; Britain experienced scarcity and Ireland starvation. Nevertheless, Ireland continued to export substantial quantities of food to Great Britain despite its domestic privations. The problem in Ireland was not lack of food, but the price of it, which was beyond the reach of the poor. Peel argued in Cabinet that tariffs on grain should be rescinded by Order in Council until Parliament assembled to repeal the Corn Laws. His colleagues resisted this. On 22 November 1845 the Whig Leader of the Opposition Lord John Russell announced in an open letter to the electors in the City of London his support for immediate Corn Law repeal and called upon the government to take urgent action to avert famine.
The appearance of Russell's letter spurred Peel and the free-traders in his cabinet to press ahead with repeal measures over the objections of their protectionist colleagues. On 4 December 1845, an announcement appeared in The Times that the government had decided to recall Parliament in January 1846 to repeal the Corn Laws. Lord Stanley resigned from the Cabinet in protest. It quickly became clear to Peel that he would not be able to bring most of his own party with him in support of repeal and so on 11 December he resigned as Prime Minister in frustration. The Queen sent for Russell to form a government but, with the Whigs a minority in the Commons, he struggled to assemble the necessary support. Russell offered Cobden the post of Vice-President of the Board of Trade but he refused, preferring to remain an advocate of free trade outside the government. On 21 December Russell informed the Queen that he was unable to accept office. Later that same day Peel agreed to carry on as Prime Minister but, with the majority of his own party opposing his proposals, he was now dependent on the backing of the Whigs to carry repeal.
After Parliament was recalled the CAPS started a campaign of resistance. In the rural counties the CAPS was practically supplanting the local Conservative associations and in many areas the independent free holding farmers were resisting the most fiercely.