COBDEN, RICHARD (1804–65)

Richard Cobden was born in Dunford, Sussex, on 3 June 1804 and died in London on 2 June 1865. Educated locally and at a private boarding school in Yorkshire, he worked in

a London warehouse and then entered the textile trade in Lancashire. Involvement in radical politics in Manchester was the prelude to Cobden’s rise to national prominence as

a leading figure (with John Bright, with whom his name is invariably linked) in the Anti-

Entries A-Z 119

Corn Law League, an organization dedicated to seeking the removal of legislation that favoured domestic wheat producers and their landlords at the expense of the urban working classes and the manufacturing interest. He was MP for Stockport (1841–7), the West Riding of Yorkshire (1847–57) (losing his seat as a result of his opposition to the Crimean War) and Rochdale (1859–65).

Cobden’s political ideas were forcefully and effectively expounded in speeches (many of which were published) and pamphlets. They focused for the most part on two related themes: ‘free trade’, and the injustice and expense of Britain’s conventional colonial, foreign and defence policies. In both cases, aristocratic control of the state was seen as a means of furthering the interests of this class by sacrificing the moral and economic well- being of the rest of the community. Cobden had originally held high hopes of the middle classes, but their willingness to continue deferring to the aristocracy encouraged him to look to ‘respectable’ sections of the working classes and to promote extensions of the franchise in order to increase their political effectiveness.

The campaign against the Corn Laws came to a successful conclusion in 1846 but for Cobden this achievement was but one step along the road to ‘freedom of trade’. Cobden claimed that government interference in domestic and international markets disrupted a spontaneous and generally beneficial order, raising the price of goods, hindering the profitability of industry and lowering the returns to labour and capital.

This line of argument was applied to the relationship between the metropolitan country and its colonies, as well as to foreign countries. When colonies were forced into restrictive and exclusive trading relationships with the imperial power, their interests as well as those of producers and consumers at home, were sacrificed to provide opportunities for amusement, employment and military heroism for the aristocracy, their surplus offspring and hangers-on. The protection of commerce by military means was necessary only because colonies were forced to trade with the ‘mother country’. When trade was free, cheapness and honesty were the best guarantors of prosperity and security.

Cobden argued that British colonial policy demonstrated many of the weaknesses of conventional foreign and defence policies. In all these cases, the upper classes’ self- serving penchant for military display and diplomatic and armed aggression were concealed by appeals to disinterest and general benefit. In one of his earliest publications Cobden turned this critique against the shibboleth that British policy towards Europe was dictated by a desire to maintain a ‘balance of power’ on the Continent. Cobden deployed his considerable argumentative powers against the confusions and delusions found in statements of this position and came to the conclusion that the term ‘balance of power’ was a synonym for a line of policy that was manipulative, self-interested and hypocritical: ‘England has, for nearly a century, held the European scales—not with the blindness of the goddess of justice herself, or with a view to the equilibrium of opposite interests, but with a Cyclopean eye to her own aggrandisement’ (Cobden 1903:201).

Commerce and peace would secure the dual benefits of cheap government and mutually advantageous exchange, both of which were threatened not by the fundamental antagonism of the citizens of other states, but by the self-interests of an aristocratic- military complex that was able to exploit the class bias of British political institutions and the manipulative skills of a mercenary and supine press. Cobden argued that the ability of the latter to create and sustain ‘panics’—over non-existent Russian and French threats, for example-made it possible for a very narrowly based and exclusive section of the

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 120

population to rally popular support for its bellicose, expensive and self-serving diplomatic and military adventures.

In his earlier writings Cobden had relied on free trade as the instrument for transforming international politics, but he later paid increasing attention to developing modes of international co-operation that were integrated into the patterns of interaction between states. Free-trade treaties (such as the 1860 ‘Cobden-Chevalier’ Treaty between Britain and her long-time bogey France) were one example of this strategy. It also embraced mechanisms for international arbitration and arms limitation, and the development and utilization of a body of international law to manage inter-state relations.

Cobden’s claims for free trade made him vulnerable to charges that he was a proponent of extreme laissez-faire, while his enthusiasm for commerce as a means of fostering international co-operation and banishing militarism gave his pronouncements a utopian air. THOMAS CARLYLE, for example, was hostile to Cobden on both scores, dismissing one of his pacifistic initiatives by scornful references to Cobden’s ‘calico millennium’. These objections have a certain plausibility. It should be noted, however, that Cobden was never committed to unconditional laissez-faire: some members of the community would need to be protected by government and it might also be necessary to make public provision for education in order to ensure that the population as a whole would be equipped to exercise political rights. Moreover, many of the ideas of international co-operation that he promoted played an important role in twentieth-century history. In a nineteenth-century context Cobden is perhaps best seen as a proponent of a strongly progressive ethos that was deeply suspicious of the continuing cultural, social and political influence of aristocracy, and resistant to rising tides of imperialism and jingoism. This ethos was important in the late Victorian Liberal Party and it also provided the context for the more sophisticated and overtly philosophical accounts of ‘advanced’ liberal politics put forward by thinkers such as T.H.GREEN and L.T.HOBHOUSE.

COBDEN, RICHARD (1804–65)