How Free Trade Destroys Tradition
Eviscerating Domestic Business to Help Foreigners Has Horrid Downstream Consequences
Trump is back to demanding tariffs,1 and the usual suspects (vulture capitalists and know-nothings) are back to losing their minds over the idea that America ought to put domestic industry first.2 Particularly, they’re spreading the lie that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act caused the Great Depression,3 an imbecilic statement given that the tariff act came after the Depression began, and alleging that free trade has led to American prosperity rather than decay.
In a certain sense, they’re correct. Vulture capitalists that chopped American businesses up, fired workers in the Heartland, and shipped jobs to China and Southeast Asia are sitting on lucrative stock portfolios as a result.4 Of course, the result is that most of America, particularly the parts that relied on steady jobs in factories, are out of work.5 But, to the vulture class, that doesn’t matter: all that matters is the eighth home, the second yacht, and the third wife a third of their age.
The problem for the free trade crowd is that, regardless of whether decimating domestic industry to make TV imports a nickel cheaper was a good idea, we have a clear picture of how free trade demolishes the part of society that is first hardest hit, then proceeds to tear through the rest of the country like the Great Fire through Rome. That example comes from rural England starting in the 1880s.
This essay is largely based on The Victorian Countryside Vols. I and II by Mingay, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century by Thompson, The Transition from Aristocracy 1832-1867 by Christie, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class by Mingay, The Earls of Derby 1485-1985 by Bagley, A Great Estate by the Duke of Bedford, and The Landowners by Sutherland. These book references will serve in lieu of repeated footnotes to the same books. Rather than include endless footnotes to the same sources, I have listed them here and heartily recommend you read them for a glimpse at a different, and in may ways better, world.
Check out the audio version of this article here:
Corn Laws, Free Trade, and the Atomic Bomb of Liberalism
The 1880 Catastrophe
Were there ever an idyllic place for those with means, it was rural England from, essentially, the reign of George II to 1880. This was the land of country houses and pheasant shoots, of fox hunting and carefully crafted landscapes. It was the land of “knights and their ladies fair,” much more so than even the Antebellum South, and also the center of agricultural achievement and inventiveness in the entire world.
Then, starting in 1880, it was destroyed. Fox hunting slowly ground to a close in most regions as barbed wire went up and farmers kept away the lords and squires in hunting Pink.6 Once rich lords fell into poverty as agricultural rents fell, and the farms for which they were responsible decayed as their country houses fell to pieces for want of the resources to repair them. Yet worse, old country squires, gentlemen without title, were forced to sell the land their families had lived on for centuries. They went from being farmers and sportsmen to seeking work in the crowded, unhealthy City; there wasn’t enough money flowing in to keep the estates up, and the land turned over en masse.
And while few might weep for the great lords of estates as far as the eye can see, the result was even worse for English agriculture. The reason for the fall in rents for the owners was that the farms were no longer prosperous. Wheat wasn’t profitable to grow, pastureland was expensive to plant and hardly remunerative given the now-vast amount of meat on the market, and bad weather tended to wreak havoc on what was grown. The fall in rents meant a general decline in investment as well, so schemes like drainage7 and land reclamation slowed as inexpensive but unaesthetic barbed wire replaced the stone walls, hedgerows, and wooden fences of old.8 Many farmers were ruined by the change, having to move to the city and work like the gentry rather than lose money year after year on unprofitable farming.
Those trends continued grinding on in the years since. Land flew from the hands of peers and gentlemen, men who were willing to rent it for a bit under the real value, in return for the farmer not killing the game and providing political support. It then ended up in the hands of plutocratic new men who tended to “squeeze the lemon” with a bit more vigor, ruining farmers in the process. Or it went to the farmers themselves, who were then ruined when falling crop prices meant they couldn’t make the mortgage payment. A lord or gentleman would likely forgive a rent arrear out of a sense of noblesse oblige, but a banker surely wouldn’t.
Those new men and farmers lacked the interest and resources, respectively, to improve the land, meaning that many of the technological advances and great projects like enclosure, land reclamation, and drainage ground to a halt, and what progress had been made started to decay. Meanwhile, relationships between lord of the manor and tenant farmers once characterized by paternal responsibility were now characterized by the cold calculus of unvarnished capitalism in a land not to see relief for farmers for decades.
Further, ever more focused on the bottom line, farmers had to find ways to mechanize their operations to lower labor costs. This meant, in turn, less employment for agricultural laborers and, thus, fewer inhabited and prosperous rural villages. To some extent, that helped the laborers find better-paying jobs in cities. But it also pushed them out of the healthier villages in which lords competed to provide them with healthy, if plain, living, and they often had land provided to them for growing vegetables and often for raising pigs or grazing a cow, making them worse off in the long term.
The overall result was vast change and turnover. Old families, whether peers, gentry, or farmers, lost their land and estates as low crop prices ruined them, and the result was a vast diminution in what had once made the countryside beautiful and prosperous. All the little and big things that contributed to that largely fell by the wayside as prosperity diminished: the great houses and farmhouses alike were no longer able to be kept up in the way they once were, those who lived in them no longer had the resources to host and live as they once did, and their children faced starkly different life prospects. Meanwhile, the once-humming countryside around them slowly lost is prosperity and energy as investment ebbed away.
Even what remained was different. Some of the pheasant shoots remained, though largely in less grandeur than the prosperous years before, and what birds were hunted by most squires were of the wild rather than driven variety. Where fox hunting remained, it was paid for by the group rather than a rich lord, new men from The City were on horseback rather than squires of ancient lineage, and yeomen farmers warily eyed the processions from their fields rather than joining in the cherished sport.9 Similarly to the sport, country house life remained, though not in the way it once was: for the first time in ages, economization was the rule of the day, at least for most families, rather than increasing splendor and grandeur.
What Happened?
What happened? Global technology finally caught up with the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the First Reform Bill meant nothing was done to correct the situation, as the urban middle class was in charge rather than the peers, gentry, and yeomen.
As background, before the 1830s and 40s, land was firmly in the hands of the old ruling class, the peers, with the gentry contributing somewhat and the more prosperous farmers voting between the Parliamentary candidates, nearly all of whom were of noble blood. As might be expected, the aristocratic government used its power to protect its traditional form of wealth: land—or, more precisely, the rents that could be derived from renting land.
They did so with the “Corn Laws,” which were laws restricting the import of grain until a quarter; the typical unit of measurement that is equivalent to 8 bushels of wheat was over 80 shillings.
The Corn Laws had a double effect. On one hand, in normal times they kept British agriculture prosperous; even if the yields were superb and depressed prices somewhat, grain could not be imported, and so the farmers were largely able to make a profit. Then, in bad times, whether because of weather or some other issue, farmers were able to recover because their crops would rise in value, and it would still be difficult to import enough wheat to drive down the price. Thus, agriculture remained prosperous, particularly the growing of wheat in Great Britain’s rich, arable lands.
That was important because, other than a few exceptions, the gentry that owned nearly half the land and the peers that owned about a quarter didn’t farm their land. Instead, they rented it to farmers, who often had farmed the same patch of land for generations. So, with prices relatively high and stable, owners could afford to be lenient and relations between them and their tenants remained largely positive, with both sides able to bring in a steady amount and remain rooted in one community.
Then political change brought down the whole system. First came the First Reform Bill. Worried by continental unrest and increasing radicalization of the disenfranchised at home, the ruling class decided to expand the electorate, as a sort of steam valve. It worked at lowering temperatures but meant that the middle class had more of a say in what parliamentary representatives were chosen.
Predictably, the middle-class voters chose middle-class members of Parliament, or at least noble MPs who were willing to represent middle-class interests. Importantly, the middle-class, composed as it was of businessmen and business owners rather than owners of great estates, cared more about low prices of food for their workers than high agricultural prices and rents. Pushing down food prices might hurt the gentry and aristocracy, they thought, but would make their oft-oppressed and hungry workers more pliable and less prone to outrage by driving down their costs of living and filling their bellies.
So, in 1846, the now middle-class Parliament repealed the Corn Laws as agricultural interests claimed that doing so would end British agriculture for good by making it non-competitive. Then, for the next three decades, the free traders seemed to be proven right: food prices held steady rather than marching upward, but farmers and landowners remained prosperous. There was no apocalypse for British agriculture.
Until there was. With the disaster of 1880, the country life that had existed since around the time of The Glorious Revolution, if not earlier, came to the crashing end described above. A terrible growing season characterized by wet, cold weather killing the crops and obliterating herds, decimated British agriculture. Meanwhile, foreign grain could finally pour into Britain. A combination of cheaper steam shipping, cheaper and better rail and steamboat internal transportation, and agricultural mechanization and modernization meant that the vast, fertile plains of Russia and America could produce and export immense quantities of grain that was as cheap as it was plentiful.
Grain poured into England in huge quantities and depressed the domestic wheat price at a time when farmers needed it to rise to stay afloat. In the past, the limited supply from a bad season would have meant that the farmers could muddle through alright because, though they had less to sell, it was worth more. That kept them afloat and kept the rents paid to their owners high, Not anymore starting in 1880. From then, good seasons and bad seasons, of which there were many in quick succession, spelt disaster for farmers because the prices of their crops were so depressed. That then meant the rents charged them had to be lower, which led to the death spiral of low investment in critical schemes like tile drainage that harmed the farms and communities that relied on them in the long term.
The bad news didn’t end with one or two miserable seasons, as it had in the past. Rather, though the weather eventually cleaned up, lower prices marched on year after year. By 1886, wheat, which had sold for over 50 shillings a quarter in the 1850s, fell to 31 shillings a quarter. Robert Ensor, describing the disaster in his England, 1870-1914, wrote that those years of declining prices saw the ruin of British agriculture, "which till then had almost as conspicuously led the world, [and which] was thrown overboard in a storm like an unwanted cargo" due to "the sudden and overwhelming invasion ... by American prairie-wheat in the late seventies."
A few farmers and some great landlords held on, but the gentry and most farmers were eviscerated by the falling prices and falling rents. Rents were even worse than prices, in fact, because the fall in prices by 30% meant a commensurate fall in rent, which would then mean that, as many expenses were fixed, a landowner’s net income fell by 50% or more when the gross fell by 30%.
The political effect was that what residual power the aristocracy had dripped away. They were able to keep appearances up long enough for the Salisbury government, which Tuchman described in The Proud Tower as “The last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition.” But with its end and the end of the pitiful Balfour Administration that followed came Liberal governance. With it came the 1911 Parliament Bill that decimated the power of the House of Lords.10
In the long run, that was even more problematic. The Liberal government of Lloyd Goerge bumbled into World War I. The Labour (socialist) government of Ramsey McDonald after the war helped wreck the British economy, as did Attlee’s government after the Second World War. When the Lords tried standing up to Wilson in the 60s to defend Rhodesia, they were stopped by the Commons, which had been made so much more powerful in the 1830s and then 1911. Throughout it all, death duties and income taxes imposed on the lords and gentry by envious lower and middle-class politicians stripped away what wealth they had left, further eviscerating the British agricultural economy.
In other words, what followed the First Reform Bill and the repeal of the Corn Laws was utter disaster. First came the economic troubles, which weakened the positions of the traditional ruling class once shipping technology caught up with the repeal. Then came the many consequences of replacing the aristocracy with their envious inferiors,11 and the result is that the British state is today weak economically, without its empire, and filled with violent migrants brought in by successive governments that view them either as atonement for Britain’s past sins or cheap labor for business interests. Either way, it’s a disaster.
Crucially, altogether that meant that the great traditions of Britannia and her Empire on which the Sun Never Sat have ended. Country house life, the social phenomenon for which England was famous, is gone, probably forever. The traditions that surrounded the countryside, from the more mundane ones of agricultural planting and labor to the brilliant sporting ones like pheasant shoots and fox hunts, have ended. The spiteful plebians in Parliament even made fox hunting illegal.12 The patriarchal, often warm relationships between farmer and owner are gone; replacing them is the cold calculus of capitalism or fallow fields that can’t be profitably farmed. No longer to farmers enjoy a cider at the house as servants have a beer in their quarters before serving brandy and lunch to a shooting party or delicious dishes to a white-tie dinner party. All is gone. Those traditions are gone because the prosperity that supported them is gone.
Unprotected agriculture, exposed to the vast scale of the world, can’t keep up. The result is that free trade has destroyed once cherished traditions, much to the detriment of the land in which they used to exist.
Most importantly, it all could have been avoided. Every country but Britain and Belgium enacted tariffs to protect their farmers when the masses of American and Russian wheat hit the market in the late 1870s. But Britain, dominated by free trade ideologues, among whom was Winston Churchill, stayed the course on free trade. The result was the decimation of its agricultural sector and, through that, the evisceration of the traditions that made it what it was. Decline of the country and the fall of the empire followed but a few decades later.
Part 2 of this essay, which will come out next week, will explore the same situation in America, with an eye toward the present.
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Tile drainage, meant to help fields drain excess water and thus improve yields, were a hugely important and expensive agricultural improvement scheme in the 19th Century. Read more here: https://orb.binghamton.edu/neha/vol31/iss1/4/
For more on farming changes and the end of fox hunting as it used to exist, see, in addition to the other books mentioned, Peculiar Privilege: A Social History Of English Foxhunting, 1753-1885
See, Peculiar Privilege: A Social History Of English Foxhunting, 1753-1885