Corn Laws

The Corn Laws were trade laws designed to protect cereal producers in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland against competition from less expensive foreign imports between 1815 and 1846. More simply, to ensure that British landowners reaped all the financial profits from farming, the corn laws (which imposed steep import duties) made it too expensive for anyone to import grain from other countries, even when the people of Great Britain and Ireland needed the food (as in times of famine).

The laws were introduced by the Importation Act 1815 (55 Geo. 3 c. 26) and repealed by the Importation Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. 22). These laws are often considered as examples of British mercantilism.

The economic issue, in essence, was food prices; the price of grain was central to the price of the most important food staple, bread, and the working man spent much of his wages on bread.

The political issue was a dispute between landowners (a long-established class, who were heavily represented in Parliament) and the new class of manufacturers and industrialists (who were not): the former desired to maximise their profits from agriculture, by keeping the price at which they could sell their grain high; the latter wished to maximise their profits from manufacture, by reducing the wages they paid to their factory workers -- the difficulty being that men could not work in the factories if a factory wage was not enough to feed them and their families; hence, in practice, high grain prices kept factory wages high also.

The Corn Laws enhanced the profits and political power associated with land ownership; their abolition was a significant increase of free trade.