to the Irish potato famine. Faced with mass starvation Peel decided to introduce a bill which would permit the duty free import of grain within a few years. In some sense it can be argued that without the Irish famine the era of free trade would have come substantially later if at all. As an international event it propelled Great Britain down the path of free trade, and it is significant that the Whigs, which became the party of the industrialists and merchants, were unable to attain the repeal of the Corn Laws without a significant catastrophe to aid them. In the aftermath of the potato famine, the Whigs gained power and eventually replaced the vast majority of the tariffs with an income tax, making Britain essentially free trade. The interplay of events leading Britain towards free trade is also an example of a major interest group (the merchants and industrialists) taking on the institution of parliament and the wealthy landowners and setting a new trend in the nation's economic policy. With varying interest groups this power struggle manifest itself in nations throughout Europe, with different results leading to different trends. It is important to focus not on the institutions as such, but on which interest groups are capable of influencing the institutions. In the case of Britain it is doubtful the merchants would have managed to overhaul even small parts of the fiscal policy had there not been an enlargement of the franchise in 1832. Paul Bairoch hints that Great Britain may have chosen the free trade policy at exactly the right time for it to work, and that any other time could well have been disastrous. He cites the rapid decrease in natural barriers to trade through greater technological development and the fact that Britain was able and willing to phase out its agricultural production and come to rely on foreign foodstuffs. This argument is slightly supported by the onslaught of the Depression in 1873, discussed later. In co...
