Irish Potatoes and British Politics: Interests, Ideology, Heresthetic and the Repeal of the Corn Laws
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00232 |
| Published date | 01 December 1999 |
| Date | 01 December 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Irish Potatoes and British Politics:
Interests, Ideology, Heresthetic and
the Repeal of the Corn Laws
IAIN MCLEAN*
Nueld College, Oxford
AND CAMILLA BUSTANI
( formerly of New College, Oxford)
The Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 remains one of the most fascinating events in
the history of political economy. A parliament securely controlled by the party of
agriculture, which was the main bene®ciary of protection, abolished protection.
Explanations have included the hegemony of Manchester School economics; class
con¯ict; the eectiveness of the Anti-Corn Law League; the personality of Sir Robert
Peel; and evangelical religion. We aim to see why the standard ideas from political
economy (Chicago and/or Virginia) seem to ®t our case so poorly. We use the
Aydelotte dataset on rollcalls in the Parliament of 1841±7, augmented from primary
sources, and the letters and memoranda of the principal actors.
The Puzzle
In 1846, the government of Sir Robert Peel proposed, and both houses of
parliament voted, to repeal the Corn Laws, which had provided protection for
British agriculture by restricting the import of cereal grains. Farmers and
landowners bene®ted from this protection; non-farm capitalists certainly
suered from it; non-farm labourers probably did. But the executive and
both houses of parliament were dominated by the landed interest. Repeal
therefore goes against all the standard accounts of political economy.1Like the
#Political Studies Association 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 CowleyRoad, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Political Studies (1999), XLVII, 817±836
* Grateful thanks to the Nueld Foundation for funding, to Beata Rozumilowicz for coding
data, to Valerie Cromwell, Director of the History of Parliament, and D. R. Fisher, editor of the
projected volumes for 1820±32, for access to their ®les, and to Cheryl Schonhardt-Baileyfor sharing
her data with us and allowing our joint data to be incorporated into an expanded version of the
Aydelotte dataset (available from the corresponding author). The Aydelotte data were originally
supplied (on punched cards) without the MPs' names. None of the manipulation described in this
paper would have been possible without Mrs. Aydelotte's discovery in her late husband's papers, of
the name key to his database. We also acknowledge the helpful comments of those who heard
successive versions of this paper at the American Political Science Association 1996 and 1998
meetings; a conference on trade policy at Washington University, St. Louis, 1997; and the Political
Studies Association annual conference 1998; and those of three anonymous reviewers.
1Which are far too numerous to list ± a literature review would swamp this paper. For an intro-
duction, see C. Schonhardt-Bailey (ed.), The Rise of Free Trade, 4 vols (London, Routledge,1997).
¯ight of the bumblebee, it could not happen. But it did. Peel was able to
persuade not only the opposition but also a third of his own party in the
Commons to support Repeal. And in the House of Lords, the Duke of
Wellington secured a comfortable majority for a policy that neither he nor most
of his colleagues supported.
The standard accounts of political economy are written by neoclassical
economists of the Chicago or Virginia schools, who take rational economic
actors to be utility maximizers. Although nothing in economic theory requires
utility maximizing behaviour to be sel®sh, most neoclassicists assume that it is.
Where any motive other than direct economic interest is ascribed to politicians,
it is political survival. Political survival, for a backbencher, depends on
representing the interests of one's district. Political leadership is de®ned as
maximizing the probability that your side will win the next election.
There are so many sub-schools of political economy that it is dangerous to
take one and subsume all the rest under it. But the following account of
`endogenous protection' written by Stephen Magee, a leading contemporary
trade theorist, would command assent in both Chicago and Virginia:
Five major ideas emerge from the theory of endogenous protection. First,
endogenous policies are economically inecient. Second, endogenous
policies are politically ecient. Third, government policies are interest
group based. Fourth, government policies are just like prices in economic
markets. Fifth, politicians are largely powerless, so that endogenous
protection has no policy implications.2
The ®rst claim is more or less a factual statement, although with normative
overtones. But the great majority of economic historians agree that protection
of British agriculture in 1846 was economically inecient. Endogenous tari
theory (ETT) then claims that protection was `politically ecient' in that it
would enable the government to be re-elected. If government policy was interest
group based, then as the largest interest group was agriculture, the government
would favour agriculture. `Government policies are just like prices in economic
markets' and `politicians are largely powerless, so that endogenous protection
has no policy implications' really make the same claim, viz. that any government
which wanted to be re-elected would have to favour agriculture, and that there-
fore Tory and Whig policy would converge on protection. Protection would be
`endogenous' in the following sense. The outcome would depend on the median
legislator: that is, the legislator whose constituency interest was half-way from
the most free-trading to the most protectionist. Any outcome which did not
embrace the median legislator could be defeated by a coalition containing him.
More constituencies, in 1846, were rural than urban. The median legislator had
rural, and hence protectionist, constituency interests. And the upper house of
the legislature was unelected; lands and titles were usually inherited together; so
the House of Lords was also a chamber of the landed interest and could be
relied on to maintain protection.
This is an elegant model but the facts contradict it. Therefore a subtler model
is needed. In earlier work we have tried to develop one, using data on railway
2S. P. Magee, `Endogenous Protection: the Empirical Evidence', in D. C. Mueller (ed.),
Perspectives on Public Choice: a Handbook (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 526±61, p. 527.
818 Irish Potatoes and British Politics
#Political Studies Association, 1999
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