ABSTRACT
Historians have adopted the contemporary view of the matter. The correlation between rising national income and the move to free trade, the apparent significance for the distribution of income of removing high duties on food and the intense involvement of Britain in the international economy have been the elements in a demonstration that commercial policy had a substantial effect on the size and distribution of British national income in the nineteenth century. The depth of analysis, to be sure, has left something to be desired, for free trade has not been isolated from other factors influencing national income, the effects on distribution have been treated in merely qualitative terms and the argument has been bound together by an unsupported conviction that foreign trade was crucial to Britain's economic welfare. Of course, free trade had ideological and political effects, and it would be idle to deny that these in turn may have had large effects on the economy: the constitution, for example, might not have survived the European revolutions of 1848 without the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The direct economic effects, however, have been exaggerated. Historians have naturally if not always correctly assumed that it matters economically how a great issue of economic policy such as this is resolved, the more so as the historical study of the issue has been left largely to political rather than economic historians. The history of economics itself has lent credence to this view of the importance of British commercial policy: since the inception of the discipline its best minds (many of them British) have put commercial policy at the center of their thinking. The most impressive intellectual tools developed by Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Marshall were developed precisely for the examination of the effect of international trade and of government policy towards that trade on national income, and their practical motive was in large part the early encouragement and late defense of Britain's policy of free trade. The sheer weight of the intellectual
achievement would incline an economist, like the historians, towards attributing great significance to free trade in the nineteenth century.
