From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective.

• Author: Nye, John V.C.
• Position: Book review

From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective

By Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Pp. xiv, 426. $47.50.

In From the Corn Laws to Free Trade, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey takes a fresh and rigorous look at the determinants of Corn Law repeal in mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain and tries to integrate the role of broader economic interests with the role of ideas and politics to find out why the British adopted free trade. She approaches Corn Law repeal by treating it as a puzzle.

Political representatives acted in a way that was contrary both to the mandate on which most of them had been elected and to their apparent self-interest. Indeed, the Peel government fell just one month after the repeal. Yet the move to freer trade persisted in spite of this political setback, and Great Britain became the freest trading nation in the world. To be sure, large-scale economic forces compelled a move to reform tariffs, especially in agriculture, but the fact that members of Parliament paid a personal price for supporting the repeal suggests that ideas and beliefs may have mattered as well. It may also be significant that in the period after Corn Law repeal, trade was neither as free nor as open as this book and the existing literature suggest (a point on which I expand later).

Schonhardt-Bailey's solution to the puzzle is that changing economic interests "accounted for the momentum behind the repeal," overturning all else (p. 2). Yet this impetus for both economic and democratic transformation--which might have led to revolution--was uniquely shaped by the institutions and ideas of nineteenth-century Great Britain.

The author deploys all the tools of analytic and quantitative political economy to deal with the repeal puzzle. In her core work, she focuses on the statistics of roll-call votes in Parliament from 1841 to 1847, attempting to understand how pivotal members came to change their positions on trade policy. Despite her focus on economic interests, her explanations are far from narrowly materialistic. Indeed, she maintains that the votes changed because Peel convinced supporters that repeal was necessary to preserve the power of the aristocracy. In her attempts to establish the latter claim, she is most original and most controversial.

Roughly the first half of the book is devoted to the "demand side" of repeal. Here, Schonhardt-Bailey's story seems broadly to match standard...