Obediently, I read up on the Factory Acts and the Corn Laws and studied the newspaper.

NEWYORKER: Hand on the Shoulder

The immediate purpose of the repeal of the Corn Laws was to help the Irish peasantry caught in the grip of the potato famine.

ECONOMIST: Ireland and Gladstone and all that

It is the hall which saw the earliest campaigns against the protectionist Corn Laws (hence the name Free Trade Hall) as well as for women's suffrage.

BBC: Ed Miliband - An historic speech?

Its unilateral move towards free trade began at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and culminated in the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.

ECONOMIST: Business books (5)

James Forsyth, in the Spectator, says the speech may end up leaving the Conservatives "more deeply split" than at any time since the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s.

BBC: UK Politics

Protectionist tariffs were dismantled, forcing companies to become more competitive through innovation, embracing new technologies and finding new markets a process that culminated in the abolition of the hated system of agricultural subsidies known as the Corn Laws which had inflated the price of bread.

WSJ: In Place of Austerity: What Comes Next?

From the Eclogues of Virgil a town dweller's paean to country life to the Corn Laws in Britain, which this newspaper was founded in 1843 to battle against, to the Treaty of Rome, which singled out farmers for special help, agriculture has always been special in Europe.

ECONOMIST: European agriculture is feeling beleaguered