The Letters of Richard Cobden Volume II: 1848-1853

Volume Two of 'The Letters of Richard Cobden' follows the career of the 'Manchester Manufacturer', who had gained celebrity through the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 as he became the dominant Radical leader on the British political scene between 1848 and 1853, generally considered by contemporaries equal in importance to the leaders of the Whig and Conservative parties. In this period Cobden not only took up a wide range of domestic issues within Britainincluding reform of parliament, of the state and of the empire, but through his world-wide contacts and leading part in the global peace movement defined his unique position in nineteenth-century Europe as 'the International Man'. In their domestic and international dimensions, the ideas and activitiesrevealed by these letters became a vital component of nineteenth-century Liberal theory and practice in Britain and the wider world.