Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 229

The protection of agriculture is an enduring concern in every modern state, no matter how devoted it may be to the freeing of international trade. The repeal in 1846 of Britain’s Corn Laws by a parliament dominated by landowners has therefore never ceased to fascinate economists, political scientists and historians alike. The author of this study is a political scientist. She is keenly interested in the theoretical implications of her study for political explanation; and toward this end, she deploys a range of methodologies which are daunting to the layman. She succeeds nevertheless in bringing out some points of enduring importance to anyone, whether layman or scholar, who is interested in crucial turning-points in agricultural trade policy.

This study focuses much of its attention on those Conservatives in the House of Commons who ultimately voted alongside Sir Robert Peel to repeal the tariff on cereals, pre-eminently wheat, which they had been elected to uphold. Free-trading ideas, as the author documents, had remarkably little to do with their decision. The economic interests of most of these Conservative MPs were still predominantly agricultural and pointed in the opposite direction, though free-trading interests were gaining ground in their constituencies. So what persuaded this Conservative minority in the Commons, subsequently known as Peelites, to vote for repeal? Only four of them had voted on the free-trading side on this issue in the House of Commons over the previous four years.

Using computer-assisted content analysis, the author finds her answer in the debate in the Commons. This methodology enables her to identify the need felt by Conservatives, particularly those representing constituencies with substantial interests in the freedom of commerce, to find a Conservative rationale for their change of mind. Sir Robert Peel suggested one such possibility in his opening statement to the House of Commons, but without laying much emphasis upon it. He argued vaguely for repeal as a good way to preserve the landed basis of parliament. Would-be Peelites embraced this notion with such enthusiasm that it crystallized and bulked large when Peel drew the prolonged debate to its eventual close. They welcomed the conception of repeal as the best way to preserve the ‘territorial constitution’ of King, Lords and Commons dear to all Conservatives. Peel was in effect proposing an economic concession by the landed classes to preserve or at least to prolong their political primacy. The House of Lords, where landed interests were still stronger than in the Commons, found Peel’s suggestion equally persuasive, and accepted the economic concession required of them in order to ward away the democratic reforms which would destroy their political base.

In the event Peel was proven triumphantly right, though his political opponents drove him from office the moment that he secured repeal. The Anti-Corn Law League, which had mounted a massive, radicalizing agitation throughout the country, was disbanded, and the fervour it had generated died. Two years later, the intransigence of the July monarchy in France precipitated a wave of revolutions across continental Europe, thus apparently validating the line of thought and action that Peel and the Peelites had embraced in Britain. Doubts about the wisdom of the Peelites were nevertheless raised on both flanks of the Continent: in Britain by Disraeli and protectionist Conservatives in the name of party loyalty and honouring commitments to constituents; by the generation in the wilderness to which the Peelites consigned the Conservative party by going their own way; and by Russia which managed to avoid revolution for the rest of the century through relentless repression.