Corn Laws: Tambora's Bread Riots, Peel's Repeal and Britain's U-Boat Risk

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After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain's landowning aristocracy faced the end of wartime grain profits, and Parliament passed the Importation Act of 1815, barring foreign grain until domestic wheat reached 80 shillings a quarter, a threshold not reached for over three decades. Corn meant all cereal grains, the staple calories of the poor. When Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia in 1815, 1816 became the year without a summer, harvests failed, and cheap imports stayed legally blocked, bringing hunger and riots. In 1838 Richard Cobden and John Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, spreading pamphlets and David Ricardo's comparative advantage, and promising cheap bread and even an end to war. Landlords, the Chartists and Karl Marx all suspected manufacturers wanted cheap bread to cut wages.

The potato blight of 1845 brought the Great Famine to Ireland while grain and livestock were still exported to Britain. Conservative prime minister Sir Robert Peel resigned in December 1845, returned days later when the Whigs could not form a government, and in 1846 forced repeal through with Whig votes, splitting his party and ending his premiership. He acted to save the aristocratic order from revolt. Sail and horse transport shielded farmers until steamships and railways brought American and Russian wheat in the 1870s, and by the 1880s British wheat land shrank by over a million acres. Benjamin Disraeli, facing voters enfranchised in 1867, kept free trade. By 1914 Britain imported 80 percent of its wheat, the weakness German U-boats targeted.

• A quarter was a measure of eight bushels, roughly 480 pounds of grain.
• Thomas Carlyle dismissed the free trade cause as cheap and nasty.
• Ireland's crisis was one of purchasing power, as crops grown to pay rent left the island.
• Germany and France raised new farm tariffs when cheap grain arrived, while Britain held to free trade.
• Rural rents collapsed and bankruptcies spread as laborers left the land for factory towns.