Free trade or protection: the political economy of Britain, c. 1780–1914

Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) expounded a clear choice between policies of free trade, which liberalised the economy, emphasising the market and consumer choice, and mercantilism (later protectionism), which looked primarily to the state for management of the economy. Free trade or protection involved fundamental questions as to the best prescription for economic growth but also for social welfare. The choice also had huge implications for Britain’s position in the world system as a European, imperial, and global power. This essay will trace the oscillations in British policymaking in the early stages of industrialisation and warfare (1780–1815), the politics of gradual liberalisation, culminating in decisive debate over the Corn Laws, the greatest symbol of protection, and their repeal in 1846. This set the stage for the definition of Victorian Britain as ‘the free trade nation’ before this was challenged in a series of political movements for ‘fair trade’, ‘tariff reform’, and ‘imperial preference’, all of which failed before 1914.

Free trade, empire, and industrialisation

Several ‘free trade’ debates have been identified in British political history before 1776, but the modern understanding of free trade derives from the publication and early impact of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in that year. Smith’s ideas, emphasising the market, unimpeded exchange of goods, and individual choice, were formulated as an attack on what he called ‘the mercantile system’, the centuries-old regulation of the economy by the state, embodied in legislation such as the Navigation Acts, imperial preference, and import and export duties that promoted the interests of select groups. Smith called for a radical overhaul of economic policy, in which the state would confine itself to providing the framework of justice, security, and education, while the economy would be self-regulating. In this ‘natural order of liberty’, the individual propensity ‘to truck, barter, and exchange’ would maximise economic welfare, so long as markets were unfettered, for example, by institutions such as guilds, allowing the optimal division of labour to encourage productivity and growth (Winch 1996). Any ‘restoration’ of complete ‘free trade’ was for Smith utopian, but the aspiration towards freer trade became a compelling goal for a generation of radicals across the late eighteenth-century world.

Smith’s ideas made an early impact on British statesmen, for they had immediate implications for domestic and imperial policy. The publication of the Wealth of Nations had coincided with the declaration of American Independence, a cause that put emancipation from imperial economic regulation at its forefront. The statesman at the heart of the debate on restructuring the empire in the wake of defeat in America, Lord Shelburne, guided by Smith’s ideas, sought to replace regulation by a liberal commercial empire, although the reshaped empire that emerged was much more muted in its abandonment of the past. In 1785, too, Smithian free trade lay behind the younger Pitt’s proposal for free trade with Ireland (Livesey 2013). Likewise, a post-mercantilist ordering of the world was foreshadowed in the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, which envisaged free trade between nations as a stage towards the Enlightenment’s goal of a universal consortium of nations. But the debate over the treaty also highlighted the internal conflicts of interests which would characterise future debates between free trade and protectionist economic regulation. Differing interest groups competed for the state’s ear, with those largely reliant on the domestic economy, such as drapers and shopkeepers, and, even at this early stage of industrialisation, cotton masters and pottery manufacturers represented in the General Chamber of Manufactures, opposing the opening up of the British market to foreign competition – although Britain’s growing dominance of global trade encouraged other interests to embrace the benefits of the world market. Politicians remained divided, with only an enlightened few, mostly followers of Pitt, ready to follow Smith’s free trade prescriptions, with the Foxite Whigs, as in the case of Ireland in 1785, proving less keen to upset vested interests.

British trade liberalisation was cut short by the French Revolution, with the Anglo-French treaty soon a dead letter, while 20 years of warfare against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France saw a widespread resort to ‘neo-mercantilist’ restrictions on overseas trade by means of Orders in Council. Much economic regulation remained in place, some with positive benefits for industrialisation, although for the growing numbers of those who were exploiting Britain’s trade advantages outside Europe, remaining monopolies such as that of the East India Company were anathema (Ashworth 2017; Webster 1990). The Orders in Council also provoked widespread opposition among the burgeoning commercial and industrial middle class, who would become the stalwarts of later free trade agitations. War, however, had incidental benefits for those seeking free markets globally by breaking down the old European empires, in particular opening up South America to British trade, but also nearer to home: the Union with Ireland in 1801 completed Pitt’s economic project of 1785. The East India Company also lost its monopoly in 1813, as other wartime trade restrictions were wound down.

Protection and the rise of liberal political economy in post-1815 Britain

Peace, however, was the prelude to the most contentious economic issue of the nineteenth century: the introduction of the Corn Law in 1815, which dramatically increased protection for agriculture. For some, this legislation was necessary to guarantee future supply, for others a reward for the patriotic farming community who had fed the nation at war. But for its critics, the Corn Law embodied protection for the landed interest at the expense of consumers, sustaining the profits of the farmers by higher prices for the people. This led to significant but temporary popular opposition to the Law in 1815, but it was several decades before the issue became the most divisive one in early Victorian politics.

Even so, in the years after 1815 a growing conflict emerged in British politics as to the future direction of what was increasingly seen as the world’s first ‘industrial nation’. How far should government policy build on protection to agriculture by continuing to protect other interests such as shipping and the colonial trades as many Tory supporters wished (Gambles 1999)? Should industry, with the social dislocation it brought in its train, be restrained rather than encouraged, as some wanted? Or how far did the British state need to recognise the implications of industrialisation and population growth in terms of employment and the need to avoid hunger (and so popular discontent), as well as to encourage export trades and possibly relax imperial controls? In this context, once the pressures of the immediate post-war years had receded (we might note that ‘No Corn Laws’ featured among the demands of the early parliamentary reformers), two routes to free trade have been discerned by historians.

On the one hand, David Ricardo, the intellectual successor to Smith, had, in his theory of comparative advantage in trade, pointed the way towards unrestrained free trade as the optimal path for the British economy, pursuing all-out export growth, even if this meant abandoning protection for British agriculture and for imperial interests. Such views found some support in the City of London, among leading industrialists, and among the influential Benthamites and their Philosophic Radical successors (Howe 1997).

On the other hand, a more gradualist approach emerged within the governing elite, whose views were more attuned to the ideas of a powerful group of Christian economists who sought to align the economic order with the God-given, providential one (Hilton 1988). They shared with the Ricardians a belief in removing the hand of the state from the economy, but did so largely to restore the God-given natural order in which morality required self-acting individuals to compete in the market and through which salvation would be achieved by just economic actions. This powerful argument steered the group known as the ‘Liberal Tories’ towards policies of freer trade in the 1820s (Hilton 1977). Such Tories were epitomised by William Huskisson, often seen as the ‘father of free trade’, under whom an essentially new course was set for the British economy, as tariffs were reduced, commercial treaties were negotiated, and imperial and shipping controls relaxed. Huskisson even set his sights on repealing the Corn Laws, but here his ideas proved too contentious among his Tory colleagues, who looked to Wellington to resist Huskisson’s ‘Jacobinism’ (Howe 2004).

Huskisson’s liberalisation, however, found support among a growing number of MPs, and his commercial policies went down well in the provinces, and were endorsed in cities such as Liverpool (the seat he represented) and by the chambers of commerce, which were emerging as important voices of business opinion, as at Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. More widely, free trade – which was gradually taken to include abolition of the Corn Laws and the imposition of revenue-raising, not protective, tariffs – became a staple of radical opinion in the provinces, although arguably this was not yet the dominant view (Turner 1994). Oddly perhaps, it was the politically reformist Whigs who again proved most reluctant to embrace economic reform, and some have argued their return to power in 1830 delayed the repeal of the Corn Laws, as attention turned to parliamentary reform (Hilton 1977).

‘Cheapness and plenty’: the battle over the Corn Laws

Having remained in the political background early in the decade, the Corn Laws moved to the centre of economic debate in the late 1830s. Their revived prominence owed much to the economic depression of 1837–42, and fear of rising prices for corn as incomes fell. Among the working classes, such fears led to vast popular support for the Chartist movement, but for many of the bien pensant middle classes the key goal became the repeal of the Corn Laws. The wider ‘march of mind’ towards a new conception of Britain, freed from subordination to the landed interest, in which aristocratic privilege would be radically reduced, had spread in London and the provinces. Several groups in the mid-1830s had begun to promote repeal, but it was the downturn in the economy that increasingly identified the Corn Laws as an obstacle to economic progress. Above all, in the most important sector of the British economy, the textile industry, many now identified its future success as contingent on Corn Law repeal. This led, in late 1838, to the formation of the Manchester Anti-Corn Law Association, which then transmuted in 1839 into the Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL), which now orchestrated a nationwide campaign for repeal (Pickering & Tyrrell 2000). The ACLL was in time to prove the most successful nineteenth-century pressure group, but its success was by no means immediate. The League struggled to convince many Tory-inclined textile industrialists that they would benefit from repeal, while facing much Chartist opposition for fear that the League simply sought repeal as a wage-cutting device. This limited its power even in its Lancashire heartland where its performance in the 1841 general election disappointed many. That election saw the return of the Tories to power, committed to retaining the Corn Laws, and defeating the proposals of the Whigs who, under pressure from their own free traders such as C. P. Villiers as well as the League, had abandoned protection in favour of a low fixed duty on corn (Rowe 2019).

Nevertheless, in a striking reversal which has intrigued many historians, the Tory government, elected in 1841 to defend the Corn Laws, was five years later to repeal them totally. Many explanations for this have been put forward – the power of interest groups, the changing composition of the ‘national interest’, the growing fear of famine in Ireland – but all these may be telescoped through the actions of two politicians, Sir Robert Peel and Richard Cobden. They began in 1841 as sworn enemies, but in 1846 Peel controversially acknowledged Cobden as the major influence on repeal. Cobden, a Sussex-born Lancashire calico printer and merchant, had emerged prominently in Manchester’s radical politics in the late 1830s and had become the leading figure in the ACLL on its formation. Having been elected as MP for Stockport in 1841, he was determined to focus national attention on the Corn Laws in Parliament, while building up a powerful extra-parliamentary organisation, able to bring irresistible pressure to bear on Parliament by means of meetings, the dissemination of literature, petitions, electoral contests, the creation of freehold votes, and even by tea parties and bazaars (Howe & Morgan 2006; Miller 2012, 2017). Yet, in themselves, such means were unable to create a parliamentary majority for repeal, although the League’s tactics and its success among middle-class opinion had the effect of driving the Whigs towards repeal by November 1845. At the same time, the League’s activities and attacks on the landed interest had galvanised the defenders of the Corn Laws, prompting the formation of an Anti-League and a resolute determination among most Tory backbenchers to resist repeal.

Given this seeming impasse, polarising land and industry, town and country, farmers and consumers, the decisive momentum towards repeal came from within the Tory government, with its leader Peel supported by roughly one-third of his party. Peel’s thinking and rationale combined many elements: a strong Liberal Tory worldview, influenced by Christian and Ricardian political economy; the experience of the crisis of the early 1840s in convincing him that future employment for the working classes required growing exports of manufactured goods in return for foreign grain; the need for such food supplies to meet the long-term needs of a growing population; the wish to make Britain a ‘cheap country to live in’; the need for stability in financial markets by avoiding sudden oscillations in trade; the removal of ‘unfair’ privileges for the landed interest; and the completion of the process of tariff simplification, seen in his government’s earlier budgets (Hilton 2006, 543–58; Read 2019). Importantly, too, Peel was ready to defy his backbenchers, determined to act according to what he saw as the national interest. In doing so, he was able to rely on the support of the emerging ‘Peelites’, who numbered 113 or so MPs. These formed a group held together by personal loyalty in some cases, but also, as shown by recent innovative work in political science, a group influenced by constituency pressure, as boroughs became more complex in their economic interests and as the traditional view that land was the only permanent interest in the state became untenable in the first industrial nation (Schonhardt-Bailey 2006).

However, context was also crucial: while it seems likely Peel would have fought a general election in 1848 in favour of repeal, the growing crisis in Ireland by 1845 provided the spur to adopt a policy he regarded as necessary, rather than an immediate solution to the Irish potato famine. Since he knew such a policy would split his party, Peel resigned, and only after the failure of the Whigs to form a government did he propose repeal in January 1846, and eventually pass it in June 1846. In the process, the Tory party had been decisively split, with Lord Derby emerging as the leader of what was now an overtly Protectionist party. It was therefore left to the Whig party to take advantage of what Cobden called the ‘free trade wind’ blowing through the country (Howe 1997, 44).

Britain predominant: the free trade nation

Despite the enthusiasm of a few within the Whig party, the party, held back by its strong aristocratic composition, had never been at the forefront of economic reform. Nevertheless, its failure in 1841, and the need to appeal to the £10 electorate created by 1832 Reform Act, had eventually encouraged its adoption of repeal and it remained anxious to build on the body of public opinion which had rallied to the League in the major towns and many smaller ones in all parts of the United Kingdom. Entering office in July 1846, the Whigs pursued the free trade logic of repeal by announcing the gradual end of imperial preference in sugar and timber, where strong vested moral and economic interests were at stake. Under the influence of the League, the anti-slavery movement in the 1840s had been won over from the belief that free-grown sugar was entitled to preference in the British market, as cheap sugar as well as cheap bread had become essential to working-class consumption. The timber trade in the City of London had long been at the forefront of free trade, and the security considerations that had long encouraged imperial supply had waned significantly by the 1840s. This was above all demonstrated by the Whigs’ readiness to take up the almost total repeal, in 1849, of the centuries-old Navigation Acts, which had offered significant advantages to British shipping and where they fought off a strong rear-guard action by the well-organised shipping industry (Palmer 1990). Protectionist sentiment remained, but protection as an electoral cause was to disappear after the general election of 1852, when the Anti-Corn Law League briefly revived its organisation. The convincing defeat of the Protectionist party was followed by a definitive parliamentary resolution in favour of ‘unrestricted competition’.

Free trade was therefore now set to become part of a mid-Victorian consensus, best represented in the career of William Gladstone, an 1840s Tory, who inherited the Peelite mantle but was slowly to gravitate to the Liberal party. In his budgets from 1853 onwards, Gladstone continued the process of Peelite budgetary reform, vastly reducing the number of tariffs. Like Peel, Gladstone came under the sway of Cobden, and in 1859–60 they worked together to produce the Anglo-French commercial treaty, the most significant free trade treaty in nineteenth-century Europe (Dunham 1930). This treaty linked the cause of peace (at a time of anti-French xenophobia) with the progress of trade, but the free traders were noticeably divided in other areas of foreign policy – above all, over trade with China in 1857. Here the gunboat diplomacy – ‘free trade by force’ – practised by the erstwhile secretary of the Peace Society, Sir John Bowring, was anathema to free traders such as Cobden, Bright, and Gladstone (Todd 2008). Free trade linked to the extension of British commerce abroad continued to be a primary goal of British foreign policy, but for the radical free traders of Cobden’s persuasion, the primary goals of free trade were domestic, for within Cobden’s ideal of the ‘free trade nation’, the pursuit of peaceful economic growth would help displace the territorial aristocracy and its dependants in the armed forces, the Church, and the colonial and civil services from power in favour of the entrepreneurial classes (Howe & Morgan 2006–12). Free trade in corn would herald cheapness and plenty for consumers, while cutting income from tariffs and taxes would lead to money fructifying in the pockets of the people, a goal uniting Chartists and free traders.

Some pockets of opinion still leant towards the view that free trade was an employers’ device designed to subordinate wages to profits – a view Protectionists had been eager to exploit – and some workers argued that Britain should seek reciprocity in trade rather than free imports (Gurney 2014). But the memory of the 1840s, when the Corn Laws were indelibly identified with hunger and misery in many rural and urban households, became an essential part of the narrative of Victorian history which identified repeal with popular welfare (Howe 2013). While free trade was no longer a crusading cause, save among the enthusiasts of the Cobden Club (formed in 1866 in honour of its late hero), its legacy was seen in continuing agitations for the ‘free breakfast table’ and greater direct taxation. Free trade values suffused a range of mid-Victorian organisations, from the Peace Society and anti-slavery movement to trade unions and cooperative societies. It also became synonymous with Britain in the international sphere, whether as a pragmatic goal of commercial policy or as part of the wider Victorian vison of a global order linking trade with the communications revolution, international exhibitions, and the shrinking of time and space as the movement of goods, capital, and people accelerated across continents (Howe 2008). Free trade in this way extended far beyond politics to become integral to British culture and identity (Trentmann 2002).

Fair trade and its failure

The deeply rooted nature of free trade in mid-Victorian culture helps to explain the failure to dislodge it by subsequent movements for fair trade and tariff reform before 1914. The ‘Fair Trade’ movement (‘Fair’ to Britain, not to less developed nations as with its later namesake) was only ever to elect one MP, but this belied its potential. Its primary goal was to end ‘one-sided free trade’ by gaining greater reciprocity abroad in return for Britain’s open markets, with the threat of retaliation where no comparable tariff concessions were made. Such concessions seemed to many exporters to be urgent by the early 1880s because the so-called Cobden-treaty system, which had in effect created a ‘first common market’ in Europe, had come under increasing pressure from the mid-1870s with falling price levels for agricultural and industrial goods prompting a widespread return to higher tariffs after 1879 (Marsh 1999; Brown 1943). A secondary goal, less clear cut but often found in the literature of fair trade, pointed out the benefits achieved through the German Zollverein – a customs union which united Germany economically before territorial unification – and which also existed in the United States, previously states with separate customs borders. On these models, it was suggested that the British Empire might also become a customs union, providing compensation for the apparent loss of European markets. A third issue also generated discontent and became loosely part of ‘fair trade’ campaigning. This was the sugar bounties, offered by European states to their sugar beet producers, which enabled them to undercut British imperial producers. Cheap sugar was a boon to Britain’s thriving confectionery and jam-making trades, but British sugar refiners and their workers were less certain, while both fair traders and some free traders supported an anti-subsidy international agreement, ultimately achieved in the Brussels Convention of 1902, although Britain was to withdraw from it in 1912 (Howe 1997).

Against this background, and in the wider context of depression in the economy, the Fair Trade League was launched, on the model of the ACLL, in August 1881, after the victory of the ‘Fair Trader’ W. F. Ecroyd in the Preston by-election that May. It produced a newspaper, The Fair-Trader – with its motto ‘The Plough, the Shuttle, the Forge, the Ship’ challenging the Cobden Club’s ‘free trade, peace, and goodwill’ – held meetings up and down the country, issued pamphlet literature, fought a few elections, and won significant recruits in men such as the Earl of Dunraven and, briefly, Lord Randolph Churchill. Yet it never really acquired popular momentum. Although it gained adherents in the textile trades – especially in Bradford, hard-hit by French tariffs, and some in Sheffield, aggrieved by American ones – among farmers never reconciled to the loss of protection, as well as among sugar refiners, it failed to create either a unifying creed of discontent or a strong coalition of interests. In part, this was the result of the pre-emptive counterattack the League inspired among the free traders organised in the highly effective Cobden Club, whose resources vastly outdid those of the League and which undoubtedly limited the latter’s success (Howe 1997). Fair traders made some impact in some boroughs in the 1885 general election, causing some loss of Liberal seats. A Royal Commission on the Depression in Trade and Industry (1885–86), set up by Lord Salisbury’s minority government in response to League pressure, failed to endorse the fair trade analysis of the state of the British economy, obliging its representatives to produce their minority report. The highpoints of the League were therefore to be a (soon overturned) majority at a meeting of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in December 1888, and several favourable votes at the National Union of Conservative Association’s annual meetings. But this was not enough: the League was moribund by 1891, its journal discontinued, although some local branches remained active.

Tariff Reform and the survival of free trade before 1914

The central goals of the Fair Trade League were inherited by the Tariff Reform movement in the early twentieth century. This far more successful movement had what the Fair Trade League had lacked: inspiring and dynamic leadership, provided by Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain, a wealthy Birmingham screw manufacturer, having been president of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s government, 1880–85, had steered clear of fair trade but had moved decisively towards a belief in imperial federation, and towards Unionism after the Home Rule split in the Liberal party. Appointed Colonial Secretary by Salisbury in 1895, he had increasingly been impressed by the economic potential of the empire, particularly as a recipe for the growing problems faced by the British economy. The Boer War, with its temporary expedients such as corn duties, further convinced Chamberlain of the economic benefits of imperial cooperation (Marsh 1994). In 1903, he resigned from Balfour’s Cabinet in order to pursue an extra-parliamentary campaign for ‘tariff reform’, the central plank of which was imperial preference: that is to say, the abandonment of the policy of free imports introduced in 1846 in favour of a range of tariffs on imports, some of which would be remitted on goods from the empire. Tariffs on foreign manufactured goods, it was hoped, would limit foreign competition, responding to growing fears that British industry was being undercut by cheap imports. Greater command of the domestic market would stimulate industrialists to modernise their plants, keep capital at home when it was feared too much was finding its way abroad, and provide greater employment: ‘Tariff Reform means work for all’ was one of its most powerful slogans, given the rising awareness of unemployment since the 1880s. Chamberlain was also careful to include agriculture in his scheme, for tariffs would be placed on foreign foodstuffs, including grain. Finally, tariffs offered a new source of income for the state at a time when the Boer War had raised fears that the Victorian state had exceeded its fiscal resources, given the rising demands on it for civil expenditure. Revenue from tariffs might therefore provide money for reforms such as old age pensions, a policy Chamberlain had long advocated, or might be used simply as an alternative to growing income tax. As the late Ewen Green convincingly argued, here was a powerful political offering to bring together workers, employers, farmers, and taxpayers in a coalition to reverse the ‘verdict of 1846’ (Green 1995).

Chamberlain’s vision had much in its favour. In the realm of geopolitics, to which perhaps he attached greatest importance, there had been a distinct shift towards empires rather than nation-states. Economically, a new fear of British decline in the face of foreign competition had encouraged more and more businessmen and chambers of commerce to support measures of retaliation. The weakening of industry (or ‘capitalism’) had also led to a new socialist critique of the economy which Chamberlain’s tariff reform was in part designed to forestall. The wider ideological context was important in other ways, for since the 1880s there had been a new questioning of the merits of free trade and its cosmopolitan ideals in an age of empire and a revaluation of protection as a policy of national reconstruction. Significantly, one of the intellectual spearheads of this body of economic thought, W. A. S. Hewins, was recruited by Chamberlain from the London School of Economics to head his think tank, the Tariff Commission (Marrison 1996). Chamberlain also had his own political ambitions: in a Conservative party still dominated by the scions of the landed aristocracy, nicknamed the ‘Hotel Cecil’, tariff reform offered dynamic leadership from a very different style of entrepreneurial politician. Finally, tariff reform offered a Radical Unionist alternative to a faltering Liberal party, divided over the Boer War, and still to escape its Gladstonian past.

Chamberlain’s tariff reform vision was to be in part realised by his son Neville in 1931–32, but it proved a spectacular failure before 1914, dividing the Conservative party, handing the Liberals their greatest ever victory in 1906, and contributing substantially to two further Conservative electoral defeats in 1910 (Sykes 1979). The upshot of complex internal party manoeuvring over fiscal policy in the summer of 1903 was to divide Balfour’s Cabinet and gradually but fatally divide the Unionist party into three factions by the time of the January election of 1906, following Balfour’s resignation in December 1905. A sizeable group, some 50–60 or so MPs, led by the Duke of Devonshire, set up the Free Food League, and refused any attempt to abandon free trade. They were to fight the election as Unionist free traders, albeit with little success, for only 12 of their candidates were returned (Clayton 2011). Balfour himself had attempted to chart a middle course, abandoning free trade but in favour of retaliation rather than imperial preference and food taxes. Chamberlain in a series of addresses laid increasing emphasis on protection and preference, and his ardent supporters, labelled the ‘Whole Hoggers’, powerfully organised in the Tariff Reform League, proved to be the most successful of the Conservative factions in 1906, although overall the party was reduced to its lowest ever number of MPs, 157. In July 1906, a stroke effectively ended Chamberlain’s public career, but with tariff reformers capturing the party machinery, his policy became the party’s official one in 1907. It was the platform on which the Conservatives lost the January 1910 election against the appeal of Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909. After a further defeat in December 1910, ‘food taxes’ were increasingly seen as a fatal handicap to the party’s appeal, and in 1913 it was effectively dropped in favour of concentrating on the Irish question.

Tariff reform, nevertheless, attracted much enthusiasm, and its popular vote was more impressive than its electoral performance in terms of seats (Blaxill 2020). Spearheaded by the Tariff Reform League, it energised an array of organisations and stimulated new forms of political communication, making early propaganda films as well as deploying picture postcards in their millions. The nation was therefore undoubtedly more divided than the ‘free trade nation’, which had proved largely impervious to the appeal of fair trade a generation earlier. Even so, the most striking immediate result of Chamberlain’s tariff reform campaign was to galvanise the forces of free trade and the Liberal party (Howe 1997; Trentmann 2008). The defence of free trade against the threat of tariffs proved the ideal issue on which to reunite the Liberals after years of division, for free trade was the one issue on which virtually all Liberals could agree and very few indeed were attracted to join the former Liberal Chamberlain. Free trade gave the Liberals an insuperable electoral advantage in campaigning for the ‘cheap loaf’, defending the working-class household budget against the threat of ‘dear bread’. In a propaganda stroke of genius, Cobden’s daughter Jane Cobden Unwin came up with the concept of ‘The Hungry Forties’, and added to the Liberals’ armoury powerful popular memories of misery and oppression from which her father and the free traders had rescued the nation. Her tract sold in its millions and the imagery of the ‘Hungry Forties’ and the cheap loaf won the battle of pictorial politics so important in the Edwardian age. Free trade also spawned new Liberal organisations, especially the Free Trade Union and the Women’s Free Trade Union, to supplement the veteran Cobden Club; but it was also a cause to rally Liberals throughout the country – for example, to celebrate the centenary of Cobden’s birth which fell adventitiously in 1904. Hence, although free trade was by no means the only issue in the 1906 election, in its fracturing of the Conservatives and its overwhelming appeal to Liberal and emerging Labour voters, it was the major factor in the Liberals winning 377 seats, with Labour making its parliamentary debut with 53.

Free trade was to remain at the forefront of Liberal politics before 1914, but it was by no means simply an antiquated appeal to the laissez-faire past, for free trade was to be successfully integrated into the collectivist vision of New Liberalism. This regenerated ‘free trade finance’ through the increased direct taxation of the People’s Budget; state intervention in welfare proved entirely compatible with freedom of international trade. Free trade also remained at the heart of working-class politics, ‘with an ideological value […] far greater than any conceivable socialist doctrine’ (McKibbin 1984, 322). Major industries such as textiles, coal and shipbuilding still largely depended on exports, while working-class consumers saw free trade as the best guarantee of living standards. Free trade also continued to harmonise with other fundamental values: a state that did not intervene in essential economic relationships, avoiding the dangers of interest group politics as seen in the United States, and a foreign policy which tended to peace and cooperation in the international sphere, avoiding the tariff-financed militarism of European states. Undoubtedly, therefore, the Edwardian free trade revival, a direct reaction to Chamberlain’s tariff reform programme, provided the force which gave the Liberals the edge over the Unionist party before 1914. The First World War would prove a greater challenge.

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