False Economy - Alan Beattie [90]
They also became adept at mechanizing the printing of cotton. Appropriately enough, one of the first great factories for calico printing in Lancashire, which would rapidly become the world center of the industry, was set up by one Robert Peel. It was his grandson of the same name who, as prime minister in the mid—nineteenth century, came under the influence of England's new weavers—this time the free-trader cotton kind rather than the protectionist wool variety—to execute one of the most dramatic moves in trade policy in history.
The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, as we saw in the chapter about the United States and Argentina, was a defining moment. Britain turned away from centuries of propping up its landowners and turned toward supporting its industrialists. As G. K. Chesterton described in "The Secret People," his gloriously nutty narrative poem of English history as witnessed by the disenfranchised poor, the political eclipse of the landowners was so rapid as to seem inexplicable:
The squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain. ...
We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.
A lavish system of support for agriculture was rapidly withdrawn. Such a dramatic transformation necessarily involved creating an overwhelming force to shift a previously immovable interest. One of those theaters of war, the sugar industry, remains a battleground for trade politics today, of which more later.
The repeal of the Corn Laws is one of those turning points that seems so inevitable in retrospect—Britain was rapidly industrializing and becoming the workshop of the world—that it is worth recalling just how remarkable a political act was the actual decision. The Corn Laws were repealed in 1846 by a Conservative prime minister whose party had come to power in 1841, publicly united in a desire to protect landowners. Only a third of the Conservative members of Parliament actually voted for the repeal bill when it came before them, and the bill relied on support from the Liberal opposition. The government fell within a month, and the Conservative Party was left divided over trade for decades. Why did it happen?
The short answer: Because Peel feared the alternative was revolution. The landowners were a powerful lobby, and well ensconced in the House of Lords, which had the power to block legislation. But the brilliance of the campaign for repeal involved knitting together an alliance of interests that seemed not merely to possess serious firepower within a newly reordered political system but to have created an unnerving threat to overthrow it.
The original purpose of the Corn Laws, various versions of which were passed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was to regulate the price of food such that farmers could always make a living and the poor could always afford to buy it. ("Corn" in this context is understood in the traditional British usage, meaning bread grains, such as wheat and barley, not maize.) But its overall effect was generally to hold prices up, benefiting the landowners. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, agricultural protection looked fairly secure. A new version of the law passed in 1815 in response to a drop in food prices—itself influenced by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which had damaged international trade—banned grain imports when the domestic price fell below 80 shillings a quarter (a "quarter" being a unit of weight equal to 28 pounds). The government of the time had more than the usual interest in protecting the landowners, from whom they had borrowed heavily to fund their European military campaigns.
But rapid change in the British economy was compressing the landowners into a minority. The industrialization that accelerated in the nineteenth century led to extraordinary growth in population—and increasingly this was a population that lived in towns and wanted cheap food, not a rural population eager to see high produce prices. The population of Britain increased