The Manchester School

By Alex Singleton | 14 July 2005

Here at the Globalisation Institute we are influenced by the Manchester School, the group of economists, businessmen, and campaigners who campaigned in Britain in the mid-19th century for free trade, markets and peace. Their greatest triumph was the repeal of the Corn Laws which protected farmers but meant that the poor starved. We have a certain skepticism about protectionist campaigners today who argue that poor countries should engage in protectionism.

The photo the right is of the Richard Cobden statue in St Ann's Square in Manchester which I took on a recent trip there. Cobden was one of the main figures of the Manchester School. Perhaps appropriately, the square was filled by a market - a visiting Dutch market which had brought Dutch produce. International trade at work.

Francis Hurt's 1903 book Free Trade and Other Fundamental Doctrines of the Manchester School gives an idea of the influence of the Manchester School in the 19th Century:

...the Manchester School may be said to have directed our commercial policy ever since 1842, and to have exercised until quite recent years a very great influence upon the foreign and colonial policy of both great parties in the State. Yet its steady and convinced adherents, who could be depended upon in fair weather and foul, never constituted a tithe of the House of Commons. Its two principal instruments, Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Gladstone, were converts, who made their submissions more or less unconsciously and reluctantly, after years of unbelief, to the doctrine of Free Trade... the precepts of the Manchester men, who, in conjunction with their allies, the Philosophical Radicals, not only altered the course of British policy, but rewrote the laws and reformed the constitution of the whole British Empire...