Corn Laws

The Corn Laws were tariffs in addition to other trade restrictions on imported food together with corn enforced in a United Kingdom between 1815 and 1846. the word corn in British English denotes all cereal grains, including wheat, oats and barley. They were designed to keep corn prices high to favour home producers, and represented British mercantilism. The Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn, initially by simply forbidding importation below a family price, and later by establishment steep import duties, creating it too expensive to import it from abroad, even when food supplies were short.

The Corn Laws enhanced the profits and political power to direct or establishment 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(a) 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 energy than rural areas. The number one 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 with the guide of the Whigs in Parliament, overcoming the opposition of almost of his own party.

Economic historians see the repeal of the Corn Laws as a decisive shift toward free trade in Britain. 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. The institution of Commons passed the corn law bill on March 10, 1815, the institution of Lords on March 20th and the bill received Royal assent on March 23, 1815.

Opposition

In 1820, the Merchants' Petition, sum by Thomas Tooke, was submitted 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 presents it unoriented to repeal protectionist laws. He added, though, that he believed Britain's economic advice grew in spite of, non because of, the protectionist system. In 1821, the President of the Board of Trade, William Huskisson, composed a Commons Committee relation which recommended a utility to the "practically free" trade of the pre-1815 years.

The Importation Act 1822 decreed that corn could be imported when the price of domestically harvested corn rose to 80/- £4 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 Importation of Corn Act 1828 whereby, when domestic corn was 52/- £2/12/0 per quarter or less, the duty would be 34/8 £1/14/8, and when the price increased to 73/- £3/13/0, the duty decreased to one shilling.

The Whig governments, in power for near of the years between 1830 and 1841, decided non 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 described 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 defecate by the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in 1838. The representation was indicated in the major newspapers, reprinted in America, and published in an abridged realize 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 number one time. Peel had studied the workings of Adam Smith, David Hume and David Ricardo, and proclaimed in 1839: "I have read any that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes." He voted against repeal used to refer to every one of two or more people or things 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 decide four great problems simultaneously:

First, it wouldthe prosperity of the manufacturer by affording him outlets for his products. Second, it would relieve the Condition of England question by cheapening the price of food and ensuring moreemployment. Third, it would make English agriculture more professional by stimulating demand for its products in urban and industrial areas. Fourth, it would introduce through mutually advantageous international trade a new era of international fellowship and peace. The only barrier to these four beneficent solutions was the ignorant self-interest of the landlords, the "bread-taxing oligarchy, unprincipled, unfeeling, rapacious and plundering."

The landlords claimed that manufacturers like Cobden wanted cheap food so that they could reduce wages and thus maximise their profits, an opinion divided up by socialist Chartists. Karl Marx said: "The campaign for the abolition of the Corn Laws had begun and the workers' guide was needed. The advocates of repeal therefore promised, not only a Big Loaf which was to be doubled in size but also the passing of the Ten Hours Bill" to reduce workings hours.

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 1841, Notes of a tour in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire 1842, and Factories and the Factory System 1844. 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:

When provisions are high, the people have so much to pay for them that they have little or nothing left to buy clothes with; and when they have little to buy clothes with, there are few clothes sold; and when there are few clothes sold, there are too numerous to sell, they are very cheap; and when they are very cheap, there cannot be much paid for devloping them: and that, consequently, the manufacturing works man's wages are reduced, the mills areup, business is ruined, and general distress is spread through the country. But when, as now, the working man has the said 25s left in his pocket, he buys more clothing with it ay, and other articles of comfort too, and that increases the demand for them, and the greater the demand ... authorises them rise in price, and the rising price permits the working man to get higher wages and the masters better profits. This, therefore, is the way I prove that high provisions make lower wages, and cheap provisions make higher wages.

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.