British Trade Policy in the 19th Century: a Review Article.

Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey's excellent The Rise of Free Trade (RFT) gathers together speeches, contemporary writing and extracts from parliamentary debates relating to British trade policy between 1815 and 1906 (the year in which free trade was consolidated by a decisice General Election victory for the Liberal Party). In this paper I briefly review some of the main issues which this collection deals with, and suggest directions for future research. Section 2 looks at the old-age question of why Britain repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, and maintained a free-trading stance for the rest of the century, while section 3 deals with the consequences of Britain's free trade commitment. Section 4 concludes.