The UK has always been a major trading nation and government has always been inextricably involved with this trade. We made a fortune out of wool exports to Europe (the manor houses of the Cotswolds, Essex and Suffolk built from 1500 onwards are testimony), then, from around 1760, manufacturing took over. Mercantilism was the basic policy imposed by Britain on its colonies.

Mercantilism defines a system where the government and merchants become partners with the shared goal of increasing political power and private wealth, to the exclusion of other empires. The government protected its merchants and excluded others by trade barriers, regulations, and subsidies to domestic industries in order to maximise exports from and minimise imports to the realm. It regulated and controlled all trade. The government spent much of its revenue on a superb Royal Navy, which not only protected the British colonies but threatened the colonies of the other empires, and sometimes seized them. The colonies were captive markets for British industry, and the goal was always to enrich the mother country.

The Stamp Act of 1765 was the first internal tax levied directly on American colonists by the British government. It imposed a tax on all paper documents in the colonies, and came at a time when the British Empire was deep in debt from the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) caused by France wishing to expand its colonies. It was swiftly followed by the Tea Act.

The Tea Act’s main purpose was not to raise revenue from the colonies but to bail out the floundering East India Company (which was jointly owned by merchants and landowners), a key actor in the British economy. The British government granted the company a monopoly on the importation and sale of tea in the American colonies. The colonists had never accepted the constitutionality of the duty on tea, and the Tea Act rekindled their opposition to it. Their resistance culminated in the Boston Tea Party on December 16,1773, in which colonists boarded East India Company ships and dumped their loads of tea overboard. Parliament responded with a series of harsh measures intended to stifle colonial resistance to British rule; two years later the American War of Independence began.

A Corn Law was first introduced in Britain in 1804, when the landowners, who dominated Parliament, sought to protect their profits by imposing a duty on imported corn. During the Napoleonic Wars it had not been possible to import corn from Europe. This led to an expansion of British wheat farming and to high bread prices.
Farmers feared that when the war came to an end in 1815, the importation of foreign corn would lower prices. This fear was justified and the price of corn reached fell from 126s. 6d. a quarter in 1812 to 65s. 7d three years later. British landowners applied pressure on members of the House of Commons to take action to protect the profits of the farmers (who were mostly tenants of the landowners). Parliament responded by passing a law permitting the import of foreign wheat free of duty only when the domestic price reached 80 shillings per quarter (8 bushels).

This legislation was hated by the people living in Britain's fast-growing towns who had to pay higher bread prices. The industrial classes saw the Corn Laws as an example of how Parliament passed legislation that favoured large landowners. The manufacturers in particular were concerned that the Corn Laws would result in a demand for higher wages.

There was a dreadful harvest in 1816, which caused bread prices to increase rapidly. This was followed by widespread industrial unrest as workers insisted on higher wages in order to pay for their more expensive food – there were strikes and food riots all over Britain.