One does not read very far into Smith's work without encountering apparent inconsistencies. Perhaps the most troubling arise in the discussion of the corn trade, where, contrary to his well-known principle that trade protection and subsidies draw to the favored industry "a greater share of the...

From 1770 to 1914, the British Government collected weekly price and quantity data for all types of grain traded in many market towns; these ‘Corn Returns’ were published in the London Gazette. We computerised the data published 1770-1864, totalling around 6 million data points. Here we...