Abstract :
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.
