Agricultural Interests, Trade Adjustment and Repeal of the Corn Laws

In: The British journal of politics & international relations: BJPIR, Band 8, Heft 4, S. 467-488

Abstract

In the 1840s, agricultural preferences on trade fluctuated between unity around protection and sector-based splits. Political economists have struggled to explain this pattern, because they have relied on the standard economic models of the domestic distribution of the gains from trade. The standard models depict interests in stable and exclusive terms, making them ill-suited for explaining change. I employ a new economic model—one designed to link the macroeconomic effect of trade with the microeconomic changes involved in adjustment—to highlight the risks landowners faced during adjustment. Landowners would support trade liberalisation only when these risks declined. The timing and nature of Peel's actions make sense as efforts to ease agricultural adjustment, thus exposing the latent sector-based cleavage in agriculture, observed economically as well as politically.