ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to depict the genesis, diffusion and contestation of the ideas linked to Richard Cobden's name, as a case study in the changing historical significance of political economy for which recent commentators have called. It seeks to reappraise not Cobden the man, nor the politician, but the relationship between Cobden and nineteenth-century liberalism. For Cobden's career was intimately bound up not only with the defining moments in the 'English Liberal tradition' but with the major issues which defined continental and American liberalism. The liberal political economy had established wide roots in early nineteenth-century Europe, taken up by statesmen and bureaucrats in Germany, Patriots in Italy, journalists in France. Italian enthusiasm for Cobden was unusually widespread, corresponding to a particular conjuncture in Italian national life.
