ABSTRACT
The fiftieth anniversary of the repeal of the Corn Laws was essentially a political affair, and indeed one conducted in an atmosphere where growing doubts about Britain’s economic and political hegemony and the correlative attractions and imperatives of Empire had the effect of muting the air of celebration. The hundredth anniversary was even less celebrated. Though the occasion of a lecture before the Manchester Statistical Society by Sir John Clapham, and marked in the press by his fellow economic historian Thomas Ashton, it otherwise took place in conditions of austerity and dollar scarcity when the nation’s mind was occupied with other and more pressing matters.1 On both occasions, the truly scholarly literature available to establish an accurate perspective on repeal was limited. The anniversary of 1996 offers the first occasion when retrospect can be informed by a substantial body of high-quality research conducted by professional historians and economic historians. Indeed, the occasion has itself prompted considerable activity among academic publishers and scholars. Pickering and Chatto have issued a six-volume collection of scarce tracts on the Corn Laws edited by Alon Kadish, one of the contributors to this volume.2 Routledge has published a six-volume edition of Cobden’s political and economic writings, edited by Peter Cain, whose essay on J.A.Hobson is included in this volume,3 as well as a four-volume collection of contemporary and scholarly articles on free trade edited by Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, another contributor here.4 Beyond these collections, interest in the Corn Laws, free trade, and commercial policy is at present intense. Routledge has issued a new edition of Heckscher’s classic work on mercantilism, edited by Lars Magnusson, author of an important monograph on the same subject and also of a chapter in this volume, as well as an iconoclastic study of British import controls in the 1950s, written by Alan Milward and George Brennan.5 Oxford University Press has published Anthony Howe’s monograph on the free-traders in Victorian Britain, amazingly the first in which this group has received the scholarly attention it deserves, and has issued the first full-scale study of the
participation of businessmen in the protectionist reaction after 1900.6 The works mentioned above do not comprise an exhaustive list: indeed, the cluster of paper around the anniversary is testimony not only to an academic interest in repeal and its consequences which has continued unabated since the Second World War, but also to an academic recognition of its unique importance in British society and in the shaping of the British economy.
