The Corn Laws and the Casuistry of Free Trade, 1813–1815

This chapter examines the Corn Laws debate from 1813 to 1815, focusing on the contributions of Malthus, Ricardo, and Robert Torrens. This episode has traditionally been studied as a moment of conceptual progress for political economy, above all through the emergence of the concepts of diminishing returns and comparative advantage. The account here produces different results by returning the texts of Malthus, Ricardo, and Torrens to their historical context, which is shown to be one where casuistical argument was deployed to counsel Parliament on how to resolve a policy question. In particular, the issue was whether or not Parliament ought to diverge from the principle of free trade in the pursuit of other principles of statecraft, the stability and security of the food supply preeminently. Once the texts are read as instances of casuistry, Ricardo’s famed theoretical brilliance instead appears as clumsiness and detachment from the needs of Parliament.

Introduction to Part II

This Introduction indicates the aim of the two chapters that follow: to illustrate how parliamentary debate provided political economy with its topics of discussion and forms of argument. The particular case studies are the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate. The first controversy concerned the role of the Bank of England in raising prices through an excessive note issue, and this question came to be examined by writers such as Malthus and Ricardo at an abstract level. But this style of argument was rejected as inappropriate for guiding the deliberations of Parliament in 1810–1811. In relation to the second case, the Corn Laws, c. 1813–1815, the question of whether or not the trade in corn should be free was treated in Parliament as a question requiring casuistical adjudication, a style of argument that Malthus and Ricardo were evidently obliged to adopt, along with other participants. Both topics have traditionally been studied as key moments in the development of economic theory, yet the account developed here suggests that we have typically misread the texts by placing them in unhistorical contexts.

Before Method and Models

Before Method and Models offers a revisionist account of political economy in the time of Thomas Robert Malthus and David Ricardo, c. 1790–1823. In contrast to simply assuming that ‘classical political economy’ existed and provides the context for making sense of the writings of Malthus and Ricardo, this book recovers the circumstances that shaped their works. This leads the inquiry into the major political controversies of the time—the Bullion Controversy and the Corn Laws debate—and the texts with which Malthus and Ricardo attempted to intervene into these disputes. The results show that political economy was produced using ready-to-hand concepts and instruments, giving its practitioners great intellectual freedom. Yet political economy was also expected to act as a species of counsel to Parliament and resolve policy questions. In this context, the presumption of Malthus and Ricardo to style themselves as ‘theorists’ who possessed special intellectual capacities that set them above merely ‘practical’ writers attracted hostile responses from their contemporaries. The tenuous position of theory in this period was worsened by the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, which enabled the enemies of Malthus and Ricardo to portray their work as theoretical enthusiasm—as the product of undisciplined minds that had succumbed to the pleasures of system, utopia, and fanaticism. The attack and defence of political economy in this setting was conducted with the vocabulary of theory and practice, and the period thus stands as a time when reflection on commerce and politics was conducted without method and models.

1827–1829

The letters that Lady Beaumont writes to the Wordsworths in her widowhood are richly detailed. Part V brings into focus two major interests that she pursues in defiance of her grief: gardening (both practical and theoretical) and religious meditation. Lady Beaumont also takes comfort from the 1827 edition of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works. She comments with feeling on the fraught issues of the Corn Laws and the Catholic Relief Act. Knowing that Wordsworth disagreed with her support for Catholic Emancipation, her comments on Wordsworth’s poems ‘The Egyptain Maid’, ‘Incident at Bruges’, and ‘A Jewish Family’ may be read as a subtle critique of Anglican prejudice. The sequence of letters ends with Sir George Howland Willoughby’s announcement of Lady Beaumont’s death in July 1829.

The Economic Consequences of Sir Robert Peel: A Quantitative Assessment of the Repeal of the Corn Laws*

This paper provides a quantitative general equilibrium evaluation of the repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in 1846. Using a detailed input-output matrix of the British economy in 1841, we find the abolition of Britain's tariff on imported grain left overall welfare roughly unchanged as the static efficiency gains are offset by terms-of-trade losses. Labourers and capital owners gained a slight amount at the expense of landowners. Combining these changes in factor payments with the different consumption patterns across income groups, we find that the top 10% of income earners lost while the bottom 90% of income earners gained.