Trade

Abstract

After 1820, most Britons recognized that the tight money supplies created by the gold standard had the effect of periodically depressing economic activity. These downturns also linked gold to poor harvests, since grain imports drained the metal from the Bank of England, and protectionists predicted disastrous consequences for the country under free trade, owing to the additional strains that such imports would place on gold reserves. This chapter places these mercantilist anxieties in the context of older fears of bullion drains to India and China, since the arguments in the 1830s echoed earlier Orientalist ethnographies, and examines the liberal response, which tried to divert attention away from gold and toward the Bank’s lending practices. Class fissures widened in a political system that secured the fortunes of financiers (through the gold standard) and landed aristocrats (through the Corn Laws) but left factory owners and urban laborers on the outside looking in.