THE ANTI-CORN LAW LEAGUE AND BRITISH ANTI-SLAVERY IN TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE, 1838 –1846

This article reassesses relations between the free-trade and anti-slavery movements in the mid-nineteenth century. It places well-known controversies over the removal of preferential import duties on free-grown sugar into the context of a broader and more complex relationship, in which the Anti-Corn Law League borrowed many of the tactics pioneered by the abolitionists, while also attempting to assume antislavery’s mantle of moral reform. In particular, the article situates the campaigns in a transatlantic context complicated by the domestic agendas of American anti-slavery groups and southern cotton growers, both of whom tried to take advantage of the British free-trade movement for their own ends. Finally, it is argued that the apparent success of the League in forcing the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 not only contributed to the decline of anti-slavery as an effective extra-parliamentary movement, but also ensured that other moral reform campaigns such as the peace movement were forced to adopt the language and tactics of free-trade liberalism to survive, generating a lasting legacy that came to fruition with the emergence of the Gladstonian Liberal Party.