A Short-Lived Backlash: The political economy of wheat protection in Europe in the first half of the 19th century

Abstract

In the first half of the 19th century, the wheat trade policy in Western European countries followed a major political cycle, featuring a massive increase in protection in the late 1810s and early 1820s, and a slow process of liberalisation from the end of that decade until the 1850s. This paper aims at understanding the causes of this cycle in seven wheat-importing countries (the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Piedmont). It discusses several causes, within the framework of a simple model of political economy. Ideas and political considerations may have played a role, but, at the end of the day, the single most important cause were changes in the expected income of the producers, mainly reflecting movements in wheat prices.