Dr Tom Crook
Reader in Modern British History, Oxford Brookes University
During the nineteenth century, economics emerged as a recognisable and increasingly technical science of human behaviour and the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. Yet no amount of expertly rendered statistics or abstract formulae could prevent economic questions from remaining at the heart of public debate and competing visions of a better and more just society. Then, as now, economic questions were fundamentally a matter of politics, and these questions became increasingly varied as Britain emerged as the world’s most powerful economy, thanks to its advanced urban-industrial development and the City of London’s status as a global and imperial centre of banking and insurance.
Financial questions regarding the money supply and banking constituted one key source of debate. These were especially contentious during the first half of the century, following Pitt’s wartime decision in 1797 to suspend the convertibility of Bank of England notes into gold. In the end, convertibility was restored in 1821, marking a victory for the ‘Bullionist’ school, but the period witnessed the entrance into British politics of recurrent questions regarding the role of the Bank of England and the gold standard in regulating the money supply and securing the stability of an increasingly complex financial system. Another, more commercial, set of questions concerned the legitimacy of protectionist measures and an inherited philosophy of mercantilist statecraft. These rose to prominence following the Napoleonic Wars, with the most high-profile battle taking place over the Corn Laws, which kept the price of imported wheat – and therefore bread – artificially high. These were eventually repealed in 1846, splitting the Conservative Party in the process, and efforts at promoting free trade continued thereafter. It was not until the Edwardian period that the merits of free trade were called into question in any significant fashion, with sections of the Conservative Party advocating tariffs to protect British industry from foreign competition.
Finally, throughout the century, a set of more social questions concerning poverty, unemployment, and wages provoked intense debate. Although the governing elites upheld the legitimacy of a free market in wage-labour and stigmatised ‘pauperism’ (i.e. dependence on poor law relief), they were challenged by various groups, particularly radicals, trade unionists, and socialists, who disputed the inevitability of poverty, fought for higher wages, and saw unemployment as a product of forces beyond an individual’s control. The result was not only gradual concessions regarding working conditions, welfare measures, and the legal status of trade unions, but also the emergence in 1900 of a political force designed to advance the interests of working people: the Labour Party.
This Routledge Historical Resource contains abundant materials to help you research how these questions informed nineteenth-century politics. The essays ‘A liberal economy: the politics of protectionism and free trade’ by Anthony Howe and ‘The politics of labour: socialism and trade unionism’ by Matthew Kidd provide essential starting points. Richard Tames’ Economy and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain affords a concise overview of how the economy developed. Noel Thompson’s The Market and its Critics explores radical and socialist views of the economy, while works on Peel and Gladstone – both of whom took a keen interest in matters of finance, commerce, and taxation – provide crucial insights into elite perspectives and the reasoning behind more liberal approaches to economic statecraft. Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism, Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan’s edited collection on Richard Cobden, is an excellent introduction to one of free trade’s leading advocates, while the Edwardian Conservative Party’s embrace of protectionism is dealt with at length in E.H.H. Green’s The Crisis of Conservatism. Multiple primary sources are also available. The collections on Battles Over Free Trade and The Corn Laws include a wealth of pamphlet literature on the struggles against protectionism. Similar, if more radical, perspectives can be found in the selected works of William Cobbett and the collection Democratic Socialism in Britain.