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

This is a long-matured book by a political scientist who is a virtuoso in techniques of statistical inference. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey conveys well ‘the joys of empirical analysis by hypothesis-testing’, and always makes clear what she is investigating, and how. NOMINATE scores dissect ‘roll-call votes’ in the Parliament of 1841-7, and ‘a little-known software called Alceste’ provides a content-analysis of 922,240 words in Hansard on the Corn Laws. ‘Box and whiskers plots’ and tree graphs flourish, together with other exotics new to this reviewer. Her cliometrics are even more impressive here than in her article applying public choice theory to Conservative voting behaviour published in Parliamentary History, xiii, in 1994: but so too unfortunately are her gaps in historical awareness, summarised ten years ago by Anthony Howe in his Free Trade and Liberal England, and not substantially remedied here. To Schonhardt-Bailey the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 remains essentially a rational response to changes in economic structure and portfolio diversification during the previous decade (with the role of the Anti-Corn Law League duly acknowledged), and her focus is still on demonstrating the interplay between the interests and voting behaviour of Conservative MPs and their constituencies (‘the supply and demand sides’). ‘What do we know now that we did not already know?’, asked a colleague at the London School of Economics after a seminar on her work, and her reply is repeated here: she believes she has shown that historians have given too much prominence to ideas, and political scientists too much to economic interests and too little to domestic institutions. ‘In the end, economic interests led Britain to repeal, but ideas and institutions delivered the final outcome’ (pp. 287–90). For number-crunching political scientists working in the area of legislative studies this book may well be essential reading, as its dust-jacket claims. For historians investigating the repeal of the Corn Laws, however (and this alone is its subject, not the adoption of free trade, as implied by its title), it illustrates some significant differences between history and a ‘historical perspective’, and more particularly between political history and political science. Numbers and their manipulation dominate here, not the complexities of people, places and problems from one day to another; and these number are, moreover, taken almost on trust. It is difficult to believe that a political historian who offered a close textual analysis of nearly a million words in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates for the period 1814–46 would relegate to a single footnote the problem of how far those columns record the words actually said, or rely heavily in that footnote on a brief passage in a long-pensioned-off textbook on British constitutional history from 1485 to 1937. True, ‘the reporting of parliamentary debates improved considerably during the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly with the introduction of shorthand around 1812’ (p. 378): but Hansard never had his own reporters, and there is no exploration of how his Debates were compiled (or some said ‘cooked up’), or of how far Alceste's findings might be affected by the substitution of the reports printed in (say) the Morning Chronicle. Political scientists and political historians alike, however, need serviceable appendices and bibliographical references. Some unlucky mishap must be responsible for the misleading Appendix to the chapter on the comparatively neglected topic of the Corn Law Bill's passage through the Lords, consisting of two lists, one headed ‘Peers voting for repeal in the second reading division of the Repeal Bill’ and giving 15 names, the other headed ‘Peers voting against repeal in the second division of the Repeal Bill’ and giving 14 names (pp. 260–61). Not even the most scurrilous tale of Upper House absenteeism could plausibly allege that this vital division was carried by 15 votes to 14 (the actual figures were 211 to 162, as discussed on p. 236), and these lists in reality give the peers reported as speaking in the second reading debate. More seriously disconcerting is the cryptic nature of Schonhardt-Bailey's inflated bibliography so far as nineteenth-century materials are concerned. Many entries seem to require considerable code-breaking skills, until it is realised that they refer to items included in one or other of the sets of reprints of British economic literature published in recent years. In British libraries, however, these expensive collections are probably rarer than some of the originals; to pursue references in this bibliography may thus sometimes be unnecessarily difficult. Still, rogue initials such as ‘Peel, S.R.’ and ‘Woodward, S.R.’ will not mislead for long, given such clues as the entry ‘Sussex, D.o.’, and everyday slips are few: a number of authors figure as editors, while the usual vagaries in publication dates have yielded a fine crop of bogus posthumous publications.