Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815-1852 (review)

Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815-1852, by Anna Gambles; pp. xi + 291. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press (for the Royal Historical Society), 1999, £40.00, $75.00.

Historians of British economic policy have always found it difficult to resist treating the period between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition as a straightforward path to the holy trinity of Free Trade, Sound Currency, and Cheap Government. They have succumbed to this temptation for pretty compelling reasons, as Anna Gambles readily admits. For there is no question that tariff liberalization, bullionism, and retrenchment were abiding ministerial concerns in this era. But Gambles's carefully researched and persuasively argued book provides us with an important and timely reminder that a formidable body of opinion strenuously and steadfastly denied this holy trinity; important because these dissenting voices have too often been ignored, and timely because in our own neo-liberal age, it is worth remembering that economic orthodoxy is politically constructed and remains open to political challenge.

Anyone who has taken even a casual glance at the pamphlet literature or at Tory journals such as Blackwood's, Fraser's, and the Quarterly Review knows that agricultural protection, banking and currency issues, and the economic uses of empire generated an immense volume of published Tory opinion. Gambles persuasively argues that one can discern an "alternative political economy" (3) in this mass of literature which rested on three premises: that protectionism was not merely a sop to the agricultural interest but a responsible food policy that promoted social cohesion; that bullionism and tight credit compromised the state's role as a just arbiter of property relations rather than upholding it; and that the colonies were an integral part of the British economic system which for the sake of mutual advantage deserved to be bound even more closely to the metropole by a system of imperial protection and preference. These premises suggest that this alternative Tory political economy truly was political, in the sense that it envisioned a distinct but carefully circumscribed role for the state in promoting and distributing wealth, which it violated at its own peril.

Gambles makes a number of telling points while elaborating these main themes. The first is that while protectionism is usually dismissed as the special pleading of a special interest, its apologists presented it as (and no doubt truly believed it to be) a responsible means of preserving a reasonably equitable tax base for the state, a dependable source of food for the mushrooming urban districts, and a reliable means of employment for agricultural workers. Secondly, protectionists plausibly depicted the repeal of the Corn Laws not as the consummate act of fiscal disinterestedness that the historiography has often made it out to be, but as a gift to the manufacturing interest that "relinquished the tariff as a tool for the balancing of economic interests" (58). Thirdly, far from being universally hailed as a measure of strict monetary justice, liberal-Tory bullionism was repeatedly assailed in the Tory press as a grossly unfair exercise in legislative redistribution that rewarded fundholders at the expense of debtors and taxpayers. Finally, a good many Tory commentators perceived of the Empire not as the costly impediment to an increasingly prosperous trade among the earth's "civilized" peoples depicted by its Whig-radical critics, but as a reliable focus for mutually beneficial commercial exchange in a regrettably but inevitably hostile world.

These are all important and, to my mind, unassailable points. But while Gambles's account is generally quite compelling, like most good books it leaves itself open to some challenging questions. How, for instance, does the landed interest's strident demand for tax relief during every interval of perceived agricultural crisis square with her suggestion that retrenchment was chiefly a Whig-radical issue? Were protectionist journalists and pamphleteers content to preach to the converted, or were they interested in actually winning converts? If the latter, why did they win so few of them...