The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Corn Laws

the general term for the British laws that, from the 15th to 19th centuries, regulated the import and export of grain and other agricultural products (chiefly through the imposition of high import and low export duties). The net effect of the Corn Laws was to limit the agricultural products available on the domestic market and to increase the products’ prices; the laws thus served the interests of the big landowners and helped preserve the system of landlordism.

During the 19th century the demand for the repeal of the Corn Laws became a slogan of the strengthened industrial bourgeoisie, which sought to weaken the economic and political position of the landed aristocracy and to expand its own influence. The anti-Corn Law movement was an integral part of the industrial bourgeoisie’s struggle to introduce free trade (see). In 1846 the British government, despite opposition from the landlords, carried a bill through Parliament repealing the Corn Laws; according to K. Marx, repeal of the laws was the “greatest triumph free trade achieved in the 19th century” (K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 4, p. 404).

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References in periodicals archive

Parliament had passed the Corn Laws bill in 1815 to keep the price of grain high to benefit domestic producers which led to the price of bread going up, and bread riots.

200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo - what happened to its heroes; How the historic Battle of Waterloo affected Britain and the lives of people in the country, on its 200th anniversary

(28) The political targets of such actions during the volatile strikes of 1842, as well as the appropriation of certain civil authorities and functions, suggest that the stakes of the struggle might have been much higher than either the Charter or Corn Law repeal.

Chartist revolutionary strategy in Thomas Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadow

It may also be significant that in the period after Corn Law repeal, trade was neither as free nor as open as this book and the existing literature suggest (a point on which I expand later).

From the Corn Laws to Free Trade: Interests, Ideas, and Institutions in Historical Perspective

Mixed feelings intensified after the Corn Laws were repealed; buying and selling at the Great Exhibition in 1851, for example, had turned it into the "Sublime of the Bazaar," implying that the event in Hyde Park was not only a beautiful apotheosis but that it also simultaneously inspired awe and even terror.

"The sublime of the bazaar": a moment in the making of a consumer culture in mid-nineteenth century England

When the Corn Law was repealed, it had a disastrous effect on the larger Irish farmers, who now received lower prices for their grain while paying an increased Poor Tax to support the victims of the famine.

Corn Law beef

"The 19th Century Corn Law Revisited," Economic History Review, 2nd series, 18, 1965, pp.

The Corn Laws and English wheat prices, 1815-1846

After receiving a copy of Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes, for instance, one Yorkshire artisan remarked, "I read the poems over one after another, first to myself, and then to my wife and children.

Ebenezer Elliott and the Reconstruction of Working-Class Masculinity

'The Nineteenth-Century Corn Law Reconsidered', Economic History Review 18(3), pp.

William Thomas Thornton's 'the true consequences of the repeal of the Corn Laws' with an introduction and annotations

Few know of Elliot, but he was the self-styled "Corn Law Rhymer" whose biting satire decried the appalling conditions of the poor and called capitalists and the government to task.

Selected poetry of Ebenezer Elliott

Gomes's acknowledgement of ideology determines the structure of his book, which is in two parts, the first analysing debates about the economics of free trade and the second covering what he lists as 'rhetoric, events, policies and ideology', beginning with the Corn Law repeal debate in Britain.

Leonard Gomes. The Economics and Ideology of Free Trade

In his maiden speech in parliament in 1841, Cobden warned the Corn Law Protectionists that "You and yours will vanish like chaff before the whirlwind" (I, 10), and when Bright defended his own views concerning the proper application of corn, he passed judgement on Disraeli's policies and eloquence in a single sweep: "his chaff is excellent, but his wheat is abominable!" (Agg-Gardner 244).

Ruskin, bright, and the politics of eloquence

A political history of the House of Lords, 1811-1846, from the regency to corn law repeal.

A political history of the House of Lords, 1811-1846, from the regency to corn law repeal