Cobden, Richard

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COBDEN, RICHARD

COBDEN, RICHARD (1804–1865), British political and economic reformer.

Richard Cobden was the leading spokesman in mid-nineteenth-century Britain for free trade, laissez-faire, and internationalism. He was the very personification of the "Manchester school" of political and economic reform—opposed equally to the corn laws and to trade unions as restricting the free movement of goods and persons. Cobden came from a rural southern background (he was born in Heyshott, Sussex) and often styled himself the friend of the farmer. Underlying his various campaigns for free trade, retrenchment in defense spending, and nonintervention in European affairs was a consistent commitment to land reform. His vision of a future of social stability, prosperity, and peace throughout Britain and Europe was premised on the redistribution of land ownership: the demise of large "feudal" landowners with a concomitant increase in individual "freehold" proprietorship of the soil. However, his work in the freehold land movement and for land reform generally has not featured prominently in most biographical accounts.

Cobden is remembered as the manufacturer turned consummate political agitator who secured the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the smooth operator who complemented the more emotive approach of his famous political partner, John Bright (1811–1889). Cobden certainly contributed much to the success of the Anti–Corn Law League, the most famous example of "pressure from without" in Victorian politics. Having moved north in 1832 to be close to his calico-printing business interests, Cobden was soon involved in the campaign to gain incorporation for Manchester, acquiring in the process an expertise in organization, lecturing, and election tactics, which he was later to impart with dramatic effect to the League.

Following fierce Chartist opposition to its initial efforts to maximize extraparliamentary support, the League, steered by Cobden, quickly took steps to avoid unwelcome intervention. The unruly crowd was excluded by ticketing, direct mailing, door to door canvassing, registration of voters, and other mechanisms of the "politics of electoral pressure": the mobilization of electoral pressure to persuade candidates and political parties to commit themselves to promote particular legislation. In Cobden's unashamed words, the League became rather "a middle-class set of agitators," concentrating its efforts on existing and "respectable" voters, to whose numbers provident free-trade supporters were to be appended by purchase of forty-shilling freeholds.

Cobden also provided ideological inspiration, transforming the level of economic argument in League propaganda, showing how the Corn Laws were not only a check on consumption but also an obstacle to the balanced economic progress of both manufacturing and agriculture. Free admission of foreign corn would increase overseas demand for British manufactures while the lifting of protection would encourage domestic agriculture into more modern and competitive processes with improved drainage, crop rotation, and enhanced investment. Much influenced by the economist Adam Smith (1723–1790), Cobden viewed freedom in utilitarian terms as the absence of all restraint (except in education, where as a leading supporter of the National Public Schools Association he contended that "government interference is as necessary for education as its non-interference is essential to trade"). Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 raised Cobden to iconic status, but despite such celebrity his political influence diminished: a great symbolic victory, the defeat of agricultural protection did not presage a middle-class "Manchester" revolution. Ranged across a number of issues, including various schemes (forerunners of today's building societies) to create freehold votes in large county electorates surrounding the towns, Cobden's subsequent campaigns lacked emotive focus and proved no match for Lord Palmerston's (Henry John Temple; 1784–1865) unashamed patriotism.

As the critic of Palmerston's aggressive foreign policy, Cobden has been lauded as an anti-imperialist, but his noninterventionist stance rested on what has itself been called the "imperialism of free trade": expensive gunboat diplomacy was not required when Britain's dominance of world trade was assured by virtue of its manufacturing and commercial supremacy. Although he was to fall from public favor, reaching a nadir during the Crimean War (1854–1856) and his defeat at the 1857 election, Cobden was not without some success in his later political life, most notably the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860. A symbol of international harmony between Britain and France, this was the first of eight "most favored nation" treaties that Britain negotiated in the 1860s, and the model that other European countries followed until the revival of protectionism in the 1880s. Cobden was in poor health thereafter but continued when possible to attend to his parliamentary duties as MP for Rochdale where he was elected in 1859, having previously served as MP for Stockport (1841–1847) and the West Riding (1847–1857).