Corn Laws

• 1. Introduction

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  The Corn Laws were a set of British trade restrictions on imported grain and food, enforced in the United Kingdom from 1815 to 1846. In British English, the word corn covers every cereal grain, wheat, oats and barley among them. The bill moved fast. The House of Commons passed it on the 10th of March 1815. The House of Lords followed on the 20th of March. Royal assent came on the 23rd of March. The aim was to keep grain prices high so that domestic farmers prospered, a policy in keeping with British mercantilism. At first the laws simply forbade imports below a set price. Later they imposed steep duties that made foreign grain too costly to buy, even when food supplies ran short. Landowners gained profits and political power from the arrangement. The British public paid higher food prices and had less money left over for other goods, which slowed the growth of industries such as manufacturing. So who built the movement against the laws, and what did its leaders promise? How did a prime minister come to end a policy he had defended for years, at the cost of his own government? And what became of British farming once the protection was gone?

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• 2. Roots of Regulation

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  The Tudors passed laws against speculating in corn, and the Stuarts brought in import and export controls. Grain was both a staple of daily life and a major item of trade, so governments kept returning to it. Imports were regulated as early as 1670. In 1689 traders were offered bounties for exporting rye, malt and wheat. All three counted as corn at the time, and the same goods were taxed when they were imported into England.

  An act of 1773, titled "An act to regulate the importation and exportation of corn", swept away the Elizabethan controls on grain speculation. It also shut off exports, and it allowed imports once the price rose above 48 shillings per quarter. That was a compromise meant to serve producers and consumers alike. Public argument continued into the 1790s, with figures such as Edmund Burke taking part. Amendments favouring agricultural producers followed in 1791 and 1804.

  A House of Commons committee in 1813 went further. It recommended keeping out foreign-grown corn until the domestic price passed 80 shillings per quarter, a quarter being 8 bushels. In 2025 prices, that is roughly 1,100 pounds per tonne of wheat. The political economist Thomas Malthus thought the figure fair. He warned that relying on imports would be dangerous, because cheaper grain would cut labourers' wages. Manufacturers would then suffer too, since landlords and farmers would have less to spend. Two years later, the same figure of 80 shillings would anchor the law passed as the Napoleonic Wars ended.

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• 3. Ceilings and Sliding Scales

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  Peace in 1815 brought falling corn prices, and the Tory government of Lord Liverpool answered with an act officially titled "An Act to amend the Laws now in force for regulating the Importation of Corn". Its purpose was to hold bread prices up. Serious rioting broke out in London.

  The year 1816 is remembered as the Year Without a Summer, a result of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia. Harvests failed disastrously. Famine and riots followed as living standards fell and food ran short. Yet the 80-shilling ceiling on domestic grain was set so high that it went unreached for years.

  The economist David Ricardo took the opposite side. He argued for free trade, so that Britain could put its capital and its population to work where it held a comparative advantage.

  In 1820, Thomas Tooke wrote the Merchants' Petition, which was presented to the House of Commons. It demanded free trade and an end to protective tariffs. Lord Liverpool, who claimed to favour free trade, blocked it. He argued that the web of restrictions made repeal difficult, though the argument was a misleading one. He also said he believed Britain's economic dominance had grown in spite of protection rather than because of it.

  In 1821, William Huskisson, president of the Board of Trade, wrote a Commons committee report. It recommended a return to the "practically free" trade of the years before 1815. A separate act, 3 Geo. 4. c. 60, allowed imports when the home price reached 80 shillings, or 4 pounds, per quarter. It banned them again when the price fell to 70 shillings. After it passed, the price did not reach 80 shillings until 1828.

  In 1827, landlords rejected Huskisson's proposals for a sliding scale. The next year Huskisson and the new prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, devised a different one for 9 Geo. 4. c. 60. When domestic corn sold at 52 shillings per quarter or less, the duty stood at 34 shillings and 8 pence. As the price climbed to 73 shillings, the duty dropped to a single shilling. The Whig governments that held power for most of the years between 1830 and 1841 chose not to repeal the system.

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• 4. Villiers, Cobden and the League

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  Every year from 1837 to 1845, the Liberal Whig MP Charles Pelham Villiers brought a motion for repeal before the House of Commons. In 1842 the majority against him was 303. By 1845 it had shrunk to 132. When Villiers became a Privy Counsellor in 1853, The Times stated that "it was Mr Charles Villiers who practically originated the Free Trade movement".

  In 1838, Villiers addressed a meeting of 5,000 "working-class men" in Manchester. The Anti-Corn Law League was founded the same year. In 1840, under his direction, the Committee on Import Duties published a blue book examining what the Corn Laws did. The League printed tens of thousands of copies as pamphlets. Major newspapers quoted the report, it was reprinted in America, and The Spectator published an abridged version.

  The 1841 election made Sir Robert Peel prime minister and sent Richard Cobden, a leading champion of free trade, to the Commons for the first time. Peel had studied Adam Smith, David Hume and David Ricardo. In 1839 he described his own reading. "I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes," he proclaimed. Even so, he voted against repeal every year from 1837 to 1845.

  In 1842, answering the blue book, Peel eased the sliding scale. He cut the maximum duty to 20 shillings if the price fell to 51 shillings or less. His fellow Conservative Monckton Milnes remarked at the time that Villiers was "the solitary Robinson Crusoe sitting on the rock of Corn Law repeal".

  The historian Asa Briggs described the League as a large, nationwide, middle-class moral crusade with a Utopian vision. Cobden promised that repeal would solve four great problems at once. Manufacturers would find outlets for their goods. Cheaper food and steadier work would ease what was called the Condition of England question. English farming would grow more efficient as urban and industrial demand rose. And trade that benefited every side would bring a new era of international fellowship and peace. The only obstacle, in the League's telling, was the self-interest of landlords, the "bread-taxing oligarchy, unprincipled, unfeeling, rapacious and plundering."

  Karl Marx later wrote that repeal's advocates needed the workers' help, and so promised a Big Loaf, to be doubled in size, plus the Ten Hours Bill to reduce working hours. Landlords claimed that manufacturers like Cobden wanted cheap food only so they could cut wages and maximise profits. Socialist Chartists agreed. In 1876, Thomas Carlyle remarked of John Bright, who co-founded the League with Cobden, and of his colleagues that their watchword was 'Cheap and Nasty'.

  William Cooke Taylor was one of the writers the League paid to travel the manufacturing regions of northern England, as the organisation agitated peacefully for repeal. As a propagandist he published The Natural History of Society in 1841, Notes of a tour in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire in 1842, and Factories and the Factory System in 1844. Cobden praised a working man's speech arguing that when bread cost less, workers spent the savings on clothes and comforts, demand rose, and wages followed. The Economist was founded in September 1843 by the politician James Wilson, with help from the League. His son-in-law Walter Bagehot later became its editor.

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• 5. Famine and Resignation

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  In February 1844, the Duke of Richmond launched the Central Agricultural Protection Society, known as the "Anti-League", to campaign for the Corn Laws. Later that year, fruitful harvests quieted the agitation.

  Late 1845 changed everything. Poor harvests and the Great Famine in Ireland brought scarcity to Britain and starvation to Ireland. Yet Ireland kept exporting substantial quantities of food to Great Britain. The shortage there was not of food but of affordable food, since the price was beyond the reach of the poor.

  Peel proposed in Cabinet that grain tariffs be suspended by Order in Council until Parliament met to repeal the Corn Laws. His colleagues resisted. On the 22nd of November 1845, Lord John Russell, the Whig Leader of the Opposition, published an open letter to the electors of the City of London. He supported immediate repeal and urged the government to act urgently to avert famine.

  Russell's letter spurred Peel and the free-traders in his cabinet to press on over the objections of their protectionist colleagues. On the 4th of December 1845, The Times announced that Parliament would be recalled in January 1846 to repeal the Corn Laws. Lord Stanley resigned from the Cabinet in protest. Peel saw that most of his party would not follow him, and on the 11th of December he resigned as prime minister in frustration.

  The Queen sent for Russell, but the Whigs were a minority in the Commons. Russell offered Richard Cobden the post of Vice-President of the Board of Trade. Cobden refused, preferring to argue for free trade from outside government. On the 21st of December, Russell told the Queen he could not take office. Later that day Peel agreed to continue as prime minister. He now relied on Whig votes, because most of his own party opposed him.

  Once Parliament was recalled, the Central Agricultural Protection Society began a campaign of resistance. In the rural counties it practically displaced the local Conservative associations. In many areas the fiercest resistance came from independent freeholding farmers.

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• 6. The Repeal Vote

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  On the 27th of January 1846, Peel unveiled his government's plan. The tariff would fall in stages over three years, leaving a duty of only 1 shilling per quarter, and the Corn Laws would end on the 1st of February 1849. Benjamin Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck emerged as the fiercest opponents in the debates. They argued that repeal would weaken landowners socially and politically, and so destroy Britain's "territorial constitution" by empowering commercial interests. The Anti-Corn Law League had paved the way through its agitation, but it now played only a minor part in passing the legislation.

  On the 15th of May, the third reading of Peel's repeal bill passed by 327 votes to 229, a majority of 98. On the 25th of June, the Duke of Wellington persuaded the House of Lords to pass it, and it became 9 & 10 Vict. c. 22. That same night, Peel's Irish Coercion Bill went down by 292 to 219, beaten by "a combination of Whigs, Radicals, and Tory protectionists." Peel then resigned as prime minister.

  In his resignation speech, Peel declined to claim the credit for repeal. He named Richard Cobden as a man who had acted from pure and disinterested motives and spoken with an eloquence that was unaffected and unadorned. "Without scruple, Sir, I attribute the success of these measures to him," Peel said.

  Scholars still ask why Peel sacrificed his government for a policy he had long opposed. Lusztig, writing in 1995, argues that it made sense as a defence of aristocratic government and a limited franchise. Peel saw reform as an occasional necessary evil that could head off more radical upheaval, and he acted to ease conditions that might provoke democratic agitation. Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economic historian, points elsewhere. He writes: "Economic ideas, and not the pressure of interests, were central to Peel's conversion to favor repeal of the Corn Laws."

  The Conservative Party split after Peel's fall, and the Whigs formed a government with Russell as prime minister. Peel's loyalists, known as the Peelites, included the Earl of Aberdeen and William Ewart Gladstone. In 1859 the Peelites merged with the Whigs and the Radicals to form the Liberal Party.

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• 7. Prairie Wheat Arrives

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  In the two decades after 1850, wheat averaged 52 shillings a quarter. Llewellyn Woodward argued that the lost duty mattered little, because bad harvests in Britain were usually matched by bad harvests abroad. Imported corn would not have been much cheaper without the duty.

  The real threat arrived about twenty-five years after repeal. Cheaper shipping under sail and steam, faster transport by rail and steamboat, and modernised farm machinery changed the economics. The prairie farms of North America could now export vast quantities of cheap grain. So could peasant farms in the Russian Empire, which used simpler methods but cheaper labour. Every wheat-growing country raised tariffs in response, except Britain and Belgium.

  In 1877, British-grown wheat averaged 56 shillings and 9 pence a quarter, and for the rest of the 19th century it never came within 10 shillings of that. The price fell to 46 shillings and 5 pence in 1878 and to 31 shillings in 1886. By 1885 wheat-growing land had shrunk by a million acres, 28% of the earlier total, and the barley area had dwindled greatly too.

  In the 1830s, Britain depended on imports for just 2% of its grain. The share was 24% in the 1860s and 45% in the 1880s. For wheat alone, the 1880s figure was 65%. The 1881 census showed 92,250 fewer agricultural labourers than in 1871, and 53,496 more urban labourers. Agriculture contributed about 17% of national income in 1871 and less than 7% by 1911.

  The historian Robert Ensor wrote that British agriculture, which had almost conspicuously led the world, was "thrown overboard in a storm like an unwanted cargo". Until 1880, he noted, farming employed more people in Britain than any other industry and held pride of place. Its technology was far ahead of most European farming, its cattle breeds were superior, its cropping the most scientific and its yields the highest. High wages gave farm workers a better standard of living than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe. After 1877 wages fell. Bankruptcies and auctions followed one another, and the countryside lost its most respected figures. "For twenty years," Ensor claimed, "the only chance for any young or enterprising person on the countryside was to get out of it."

  Until 1880, landowners had been the richest class in the nation. Falling rural rents, especially in arable areas, dethroned them, and the loss of political leadership followed.

  Skilled farmers on good land still did well. Those with mediocre skills or marginal land fell behind, and many moved to the cities or emigrated in unprecedented numbers. Many emigrants were small, under-capitalised grain farmers squeezed out by low prices. They could not expand output or manage the more complex work of raising livestock. Ireland followed a similar pattern. Cereal production there was labour-intensive, so falling grain prices cut the demand for farm labour and the output of barley, oats and wheat. At the same time, emigration shrank the labour supply and pushed wages beyond what arable farmers could sustain.

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• 8. Why Britain Held Firm

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  Benjamin Disraeli, who became overall Conservative leader in 1868, had once been a staunch defender of the Corn Laws and had predicted ruin for agriculture if they were repealed. As prime minister, unlike most European governments, he did not revive tariffs on imported cereals. Landowners called for the Corn Laws to return. Disraeli replied that the issue was settled and that protection was impracticable.

  Robert Ensor credited the difference with the Continent to conscription. Continental governments valued rural men as soldiers, while Britain had no conscript army. He added that Britain had staked its future on remaining "the workshop of the world", the leading manufacturing nation. Robert Blake offered another reason. He said Disraeli was deterred because the urban working class was enjoying cheap imported food during an industrial depression with rising unemployment. Disraeli had enfranchised working men in 1867, and their votes were crucial in a general election.

  A 2021 study found that repeal benefitted the bottom 90% of income earners in the United Kingdom economically, while causing income losses for the top 10%. Economic historians see the repeal of the Corn Laws as a decisive shift toward free trade in Britain.

  By 1914, Britain depended on imports for four-fifths of its wheat and 40% of its meat. In the First World War, German U-boats sank ships carrying food to Britain, hoping to exploit that dependence, but they were eventually defeated. In the Second World War, Germany tried again in the Battle of the Atlantic and again failed to starve Britain into surrender.

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