Tory economic discourse from the age of restriction to the rise of Disraeli: 1797-1850

In 1797 Pitt the Younger's war-time government promulgated the Restriction Act which suspended cash payments from the Bank of England, with the proviso that soon after the restoration of peace, the payments would be resumed and the ancient metallic standard of nation restored. Contemporary accounts from the period, as well as current historiography, acknowledge Great Britain experienced great prosperity during this Age of Restriction: the question was whether it was built on a true and solid foundation. The conservative understanding of the consequences of a resumption of specie payments informed their subsequent position in favor of protection in agriculture. Indeed, there is considerably evidence that the Corn Laws were a second-choice policy prescription to counter the deflationary effects of the gold standard, the true solution, as the conservatives argued, was a more expansive currency system like bimetallism or a free-banking system like Scotland’s, founded upon a variant of the real bills doctrine. The irony is that while the conservatives were more pro-free market on the margins of money and banking, their response to bullionism called for more government intervention to counteract the pernicious effects generated by government activity in the first instance. This paper presents these arguments as a conservative bid for the support of the "productive classes" of the nation, which alters the way the Tories should be understood, and sheds light on an important group of people about whom scholars still know very little.