English Agricultural Markets and the State: The Corn Returns

At the urging of the Georgical Committee of the Royal Society, from 1685 the English Parliament required regular reporting of the average prices and quantities of six agricultural commodities (wheat, rye, barley, oats, beans and peas) sold in specified maritime ports and inland market towns. After 1770, these ‘Corn Returns’ were published weekly in the London Gazette; reprinted in almost all local and regional newspapers, contemporary readers followed them as closely as stock market prices today. It was no accident that David Ricardo in his debates with Thomas Malthus employed a ‘corn model’ as the Corn Returns provided an unbroken time series of the prices of standardized commodities and a common evidentiary base from which the authors and their readers could reason from first principles. Yet despite their significance to contemporaries, most scholars have been put off by the sheer size of the data set. The goal of my project is two-fold: to offer a radical reconsideration of the centrality of the Corn Returns to the development of classical liberal political economy and to employ advanced statistical techniques to use this unparalleled resource to answer fundamental questions about how far the Corn Laws enriched agrarian interests at the expense of the manufacturing sector or of urban laborers, and how far their repeal represented a boost to British manufacturing. By creating a resource (The Corn Returns Online) through which this data will be freely and publicly available, I hope to encourage scholars in related fields to revisit debates about the role of the Corn Laws in the Irish famine and to reconsider their contribution to the environmental and climate history of Britain in the first industrial age.