The Corn Laws

The pamphlets, newspaper articles and tracts in this collection provide source material for the study of the Anti-Corn Law campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s and their role in the formation of popular economics in Britain. The 1815 Corn Law, passed at the end of the French Wars to ensure the continued profitability of British agriculture resulted in a debate which ended with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Opposition to the Corn Laws was focused by the foundation of the Manchester-based Anti-Corn Law League in 1838. The League's campaign for a complete repeal of the Corn Laws was not solely for unrestricted free trade (which itself raised the moral problem of trade in slave-produced sugar), but it also raised a variety of constitutional, social, moral and political issues. It adopted and developed new techniques in popular politics and was part of the loosely-defined general reformist movement of its time, which eventually provided the basis of the British Liberal Party. The League held a market theory of wages and prices substantially different to the Ricardian labour theory of value and the Iron Law of Wages. it believed in an heavily-designed world which allowed unrestricted economic growth under conditions of free exchange. The repeal of the Corn Laws was widely perceived as the triumph of free trade theory in Britain. It marks the advent of the culture of free trade in British popular politics and was an important victory for the reform movement. Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the repeal of the Corn Laws, the material in this collection offers a new view of the range and issues of the Anti-Corn Law campaign as well as its techniques and rhetoric.