Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), pp. 76–94

By documenting the legislative history of the Corn Laws from 1670 and using previously unused data to calculate annual ad valorem equivalents (AVE) for most years from 1814, it is possible to establish several important facts about British wheat protection. Statutory protection was only significant for a few years after 1815, the decline starting in the 1820s and continuing beyond the famous ‘repeal’ in 1846. The level of protection prior to 1846 was, for many years, much lower than previous accounts have suggested. In fact, from 1828 the Corn Laws were specifically designed to allow grain to enter Britain at low levels of duty, and prohibitive duties were the exception rather than the norm. 

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