Corn Laws
The Corn Laws were a series of British laws regarding taxes on grains, which is called "corn" in that country. The laws were passed in the 1800s. The laws were passed to help and to protect British landowners. Prime Minister Lord Liverpool passed them in 1815. If the price for corn was below 80 shillings per quarter, importing corn was forbidden; otherwise, there were no import taxes.
In 1822 and 1828, there were small changes to the laws. The laws caused many protests and were phased out under Prime Minister Robert Peel's government in 1846, partly because over one million people starved in Ireland between 1846 and 1849. The famine is known as Irish Potato Famine today.
Economists such as David Ricardo were against the Corn Laws. Ricardo believed that overall, protectionism made corn too expensive for the British economy as a whole and that the laws caused too much protection of agriculture. He wrote from 1817 about those ideas in his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. However, the economist Thomas Malthus supported the laws since he thought that they helped British agriculture and stopped the country from depending on others.
