ABSTRACT
The Victorian world was bitterly divided on many issues, but no conflict reverberated with greater intensity than that fought between ‘free trade’ and ‘protection’, whether in Britain, the Empire, or indeed Victorian America. Here were encapsulated in effect two rival cultures, one seeking to democratise consumption by the removal of tariff barriers, outward looking and global in perspective, emancipatory and libertarian in intent; the other, inward looking, distrustful of the perils of the global market, seeking reassurance within national structures. At the heart of this conflict as it first divided the metropolitan nation was the fate of the Corn Laws, whose eventual repeal in 1846 provided a defining moment in the Victorian world (Schonhardt-Bailey 2006). This antagonism derived from abstract economic reasoning on the nature of the market in the age of classical political economy, but it acquired huge overtones involving class, religion, morality, the constitution, the empire and foreign policy. Unsurpris ingly perhaps this bitter contest over the merits of free trade was not substantially refought in Britain for the remainder of the nineteenth century, although it remained a major conflict within continental, imperial and American politics. By contrast, in Britain free trade became widely described as a unifying creed, a secular religion, part of the mental furniture of every Englishman (and woman) in a way that belied the divisions it evoked in the 1840s and again even more starkly in the 1900s. For the greater part of Victoria’s reign therefore free trade was a dominant ideology to which virtually all Britons publicly subscribed (Howe 1997; Trentmann 2008).
