The Repeal of the Corn Laws: Britain's Turn to Free Trade, 1846

In the middle of October 1845 Sir Robert Peel began reading reports from Ireland about a disease nobody could identify. Potato plants had blackened in the fields, first in the east, then everywhere, and tubers that looked sound when lifted were turning to grey pulp in storage pits within weeks. Peel had been Prime Minister for four years, leading a Conservative party that existed in large part to defend the price of British wheat. Before the month was out he had circulated a memorandum to his Cabinet proposing that the defences be dismantled.

It took eight months, cost him his government, split his party for a generation, and produced the single most consequential piece of commercial legislation of the nineteenth century. What followed was not the collapse of British agriculture that landowners predicted, nor the immediate cheap loaf the reformers promised. Something stranger happened: for twenty-five years almost nothing changed, and then everything did.

Eighty Shillings a Quarter

The Corn Laws were old, but the version Peel inherited was a product of the peace. On 23 March 1815, with Napoleon back from Elba and British grain prices already sliding from their wartime peak, Parliament passed the Importation Act. Its rule was blunt to the point of crudeness: foreign wheat could not enter British ports at all until the domestic price reached eighty shillings per quarter. Below that threshold, the market was closed. Landowners who had borrowed and enclosed and drained on the strength of war prices were being handed a statutory floor under their rents.

Riots broke out in London while the bill was in committee, and troops were posted at the houses of members who had spoken for it. That reaction told Parliament something about the politics of bread, and the eighty-shilling prohibition was progressively softened. William Huskisson's revisions of the 1820s gave way in 1828 to a sliding scale under Wellington's administration, replacing the flat prohibition with duties that fell as prices rose. Peel himself cut the scale again in his Budget of 1842, lowering the maximum duty and trimming more than seven hundred other tariff lines, and paying for the lost revenue by reviving the income tax at sevenpence in the pound — a peacetime levy that was supposed to expire in three years and never has.

Each of those reforms was a concession that conceded the argument. A sliding scale admits that price is the thing being managed. Once protection is a dial rather than a wall, the only question left is where to set it, and the answer to that question is political rather than principled.

Manchester's Machine

Opposition to the Corn Laws had existed since 1815, mostly as pamphleteering. It became a political force in Manchester. A local Anti-Corn Law Association formed in 1838; the following March, delegates from across the manufacturing districts converted it into the national Anti-Corn Law League, with an organisation that had no real precedent in British public life.

Richard Cobden, a Manchester calico printer, and John Bright, a Rochdale mill owner and Quaker, made the League's case in a register that was moral as much as economic. Bread taxed for the benefit of landlords was theft from the labourer's wage; grain kept out was also British cloth kept out, because a nation that cannot sell wheat to Britain cannot buy cottons from Lancashire. Their argument fused self-interest and conscience so tightly that contemporaries could never quite separate them, and neither can historians.

What made the League formidable was administrative rather than rhetorical. It exploited the penny post introduced in 1840 to distribute tracts by the million. It employed paid lecturers, ran a weekly paper, and — most effective of all — systematically worked the electoral registers, buying forty-shilling freeholds to create qualified county voters and challenging protectionist registrations one by one. Cobden entered Parliament for Stockport in 1841 and Bright for Durham in 1843, so the pressure was applied inside the chamber and outside it at once. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey's analysis of the division lists and constituency data treats the League's real achievement as shifting the perceived interests of sitting members rather than converting the public (Schonhardt-Bailey, 2006).

Peel's own conversion has been argued over ever since, because it is hard to separate conviction from calculation in a man who kept both well hidden. Douglas Irwin's reading of the episode gives weight to Peel's understanding of the incidence of the duty: he had come to believe that protection raised rents without securing supply, and that the political cost of defending it would eventually exceed the benefit to the class it protected (Irwin, 1989). Norman Gash, working through Peel's papers, found a man who had decided the thing was indefensible well before the blight and was waiting for an occasion (Gash, 1972).

Phytophthora infestans supplied one.

The Cabinet Breaks

Peel put his proposal to Cabinet on 1 November 1845 and found himself in a minority of his own colleagues. Through November and into December he pressed, with Sir James Graham and a handful of others behind him and the bulk of the Cabinet — Lord Stanley most immovably — refusing. On 5 December he resigned.

The alternative did not materialise. Lord John Russell, leader of the Whigs, was invited to form a government, accepted, spent a fortnight failing to assemble one, and handed the commission back. Peel resumed office on 20 December 1845 with his authority curiously enlarged: he was now the only man who could govern, and everyone knew it.

He introduced the repeal measure on 27 January 1846. The bill did not abolish the duty at a stroke. It cut the scale sharply on royal assent, held a reduced interim tariff for two and a half years, and provided for the whole structure to lapse on 1 February 1849, leaving a nominal registration duty of one shilling per quarter — itself swept away by Robert Lowe in 1869. Protection was to be withdrawn on a published timetable, which was politically shrewd and economically almost beside the point, since the timetable's existence told every grain merchant in Europe what British demand would look like in 1850.

The Division of 15 May

Debate ran for months and turned into the destruction of a party. Benjamin Disraeli, a backbencher with no office and a grudge, made himself the voice of the betrayed by prosecuting Peel for the crime of governing on his opponents' principles — he had, in Disraeli's phrase from an earlier assault, caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes. It was funny, it was accurate, and it was fatal.

The third reading passed the Commons on 15 May 1846 by 327 votes to 229. Look at where those votes came from and the scale of the rupture is clear: Peel carried his own bill on Whig, Radical and Irish support, while roughly two-thirds of his own Conservative members voted against him. The Lords, where the landed interest was not a faction but the constitution, were expected to kill it. Wellington held them in line instead, on the argument that the Upper House could not safely destroy a measure the Commons had passed and the Crown's ministers had staked themselves on. His private assessment of the whole business was less elevated, and his remark that rotten potatoes had done it all — they put Peel in his damned fright — has outlived most of the speeches.

Royal assent came on 26 June 1846. That same night Peel's government was defeated on an Irish coercion bill, brought down by protectionist Conservatives voting with the opposition to punish him. He resigned on 29 June, and in the speech that closed his career he gave the credit away:

"The name which ought to be associated with the success of these measures is the name of a man who, acting, I believe, from pure and disinterested motives, has advocated their cause with untiring energy, and by appeals to reason expressed by an eloquence the more to be admired because it was unaffected and unadorned — the name of Richard Cobden."

He also wrote his own epitaph, and knew it: "It may be that I shall leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour, and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice."

Peel never held office again. His party, having expelled its own most capable administrator, would not win a parliamentary majority until 1874.

Twenty-Five Years of Nothing

Here is the awkward fact about the most famous liberalisation in British history. Wheat did not get much cheaper.

Read the series and the story is weather, not legislation. Prices spiked to about seventy shillings in 1847, the worst famine year, when repeal was already law. They fell to a trough near thirty-eight shillings in 1851, then climbed back above seventy during the Crimean War as Russian and Danubian supply was cut off. Through the 1860s wheat oscillated in the forties, fifties and sixties, touching sixty-four shillings again in 1867. An observer in 1870 comparing the decade after repeal with the decade before it would have struggled to identify the intervention.

Jeffrey Williamson's estimates of what the Corn Laws were actually doing by the 1840s help explain why. The sliding scale had already been cut so far, and British demand had grown so much faster than the exportable surplus of the Baltic and the Black Sea, that the binding duty in the early 1840s was modest — repeal removed a restraint that was no longer restraining very much (Williamson, 1990). Continental Europe in 1850 simply could not put enough grain on ships to move the British price. There was no spare wheat in the world.

What changed that was not a statute but a logistics revolution on another continent. Kevin O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson locate the real grain invasion in the 1870s, driven by American railroad mileage, the steel-hulled steamship, and falling ocean freight rates that collapsed the Liverpool–Chicago price gap (O'Rourke and Williamson, 1999). Prairie wheat needed an institutional apparatus as much as a track bed: the graded, warehoused, contractable bushel assembled by the Chicago Board of Trade between 1848 and 1865 is what let a Liverpool miller buy a cargo he had never seen. When that machinery matured, British wheat prices fell to levels that would have been unimaginable in 1846 — into the twenties and low thirties by the 1890s — and English arable farming entered a depression it never fully left.

So repeal mattered enormously, but with a lag of a quarter-century, and its effect was to leave Britain's door open at precisely the moment the world learned to grow and ship surplus grain at scale. That was luck as much as foresight.

What Repeal Did Not Do

It did not save Ireland. Repeal was justified on famine grounds and was close to irrelevant to the famine, because the constraint in Ireland was not the price of imported grain but the total absence of money among the people who needed it. Between 1845 and 1852 roughly a million people died and another million emigrated, while grain and livestock continued to leave Irish ports. Peel's administration bought Indian corn and organised public works, and the relief policy of the Whig government that followed was narrower still.

Nor did it end protection as a British political question. What it did was change which side had to argue. Cobden's next project was reciprocal: the commercial treaty he negotiated with Michel Chevalier and signed on 23 January 1860 cut French duties and British wine and brandy duties together, and set off a chain of most-favoured-nation treaties across Europe. Free trade became the assumption rather than the proposition, and stayed the assumption for eighty-six years — through the pressures of the 1880s, through the tariff-reform campaign that split the Conservatives again in 1903, and even through the deflationary discipline of Churchill's 1925 return to the gold standard at pre-war parity. It ended in 1932, when the Import Duties Act put a general tariff on British imports in the same wave of retaliation that produced the Smoot–Hawley tariff in the United States.

The 1840s did not feel like a decade of liberal triumph while it was happening. Capital was pouring into the railway mania that peaked in 1845 and broke the following year, the Bank Charter Act of 1844 was about to be suspended in the commercial crisis of October 1847, and the same harvest failure that supplied Peel's argument for repeal was draining gold to pay for imported food. Repeal, the railway bust and the 1847 panic were one tangled episode, and contemporaries experienced them that way.

Constitution Hill

Peel spent four years on the back benches, supporting the Whigs he had armed. On 29 June 1850 — four years to the day after his resignation — his horse threw him on Constitution Hill and he died on 2 July. Cobden lived until 1865, Bright until 1889, long enough to see the doctrine become orthodoxy and to dislike much of what was done in its name.

The Gazette still printed the average price of British wheat every week for decades after there was any duty for it to trigger, a column of figures left over from a machine that had been switched off. A farmer in Norfolk in 1895, looking at thirty shillings a quarter, was reading the price of Kansas.