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• Preface
• The Manchester School of Economics
• Introduction: Manchester Revisited
• 1: What the School Was
• 2: The Economists and the School
• 3: The Corn Laws
• 4: The Campaign For Repeal
• 5: Why the Laws Were Repealed
• 6: The School After Repeal
• Bibliography
• I.: The School, Its Leaders, and the Ideas
• II.: The Repeal Campaign
• The League
• The Struggle
• III.: The Period, the People, and Their Ideas
• The Economist
• The Non-conformist
• IV.: The Economists On the Corn Laws

to

W., H., and C.

Preface

This is a study of the Manchester School, which was a group of businessmen who forced Great Britain to repeal its corn laws and thereby to commit itself finally to free trade. In the agitation which brought this about, they said a great many things. What is best remembered is an extravagant notion of laisser faire, but that is not what is most important. One of the purposes of the study is the negative one of dispelling the misconception. A more important purpose is to explain what the school was, what it did, and why. That, I believe, is as interesting and as consequential as what legend (with some help from themselves) has made of them.

This is one of several studies I have made of the history of economic liberalism, and all are about the development of the idea or its practice. The others are on the classical economists, the mercantilists, the Stoics, and the men who wrote the American Constitution. This study differs from them in being more a history of events than of an idea, because the Manchester School, unlike the classical economists for example, was a group of agitators who meant the government to act in certain ways, and its members spent less time in reasoning and writing about their purposes than in winning the country over to them.

I have been able to use the minutes of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce for the period of the corn law agitation, the Place Collection, Cobden’s diaries, and other source material. It provided some new information and some interesting and corroborative details. But on the very important questions of why Cobden and Bright were free traders and what their economic ideas were, it did not yield anything that is not in their published speeches and in the biographies by Morley and Trevelyan. I should like to have my study judged by the conclusions drawn from information that in good part has been known for a long time rather than by its disclosure of information that other writers on the subject have not reported or have not noticed. My respect for historians is great, but I am not one, and it is as an economist that I have interpreted the subject.

This study is not meant only for economists—although I should be pleased if they were to share my interest in its details as well as to recognize, as they long have done, the relevance of the topic to contemporary economic policy; it is meant also for those outside the field.

I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Illinois and the Volker Fund for making possible a year in England; to Mr. James Ainslee, secretary of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, for making available the minutes of that organization for the period 1821-65; to the librarians and attendants of the Central Library of Manchester, the British Museum, and the Goldsmith’s Library of the University of London for their helpfulness and unfailing courtesy. I want to acknowledge my indebtedness to my friends, Eugene Rotwein of the University of Wisconsin, and T. W. Hutchison of the University of Birmingham, England, for what I learned in the many talks we had on the subject, while nevertheless making it quite clear that only I am at fault for anything which is inaccurate or wrong-headed.

William D. Grampp

Chicago, Illinois