Richard Cobden

Richard Cobden was a British Radical and Liberal politician, manufacturer, and a campaigner for free trade and peace, associated with the Anti-Corn Law League and the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty. As a young man he was a successful commercial traveller who became co-owner of a highly profitable calico printing factory in Sabden but lived in Manchester, a city with which he became strongly identified; he soon found himself more engaged in politics, and his travels convinced him of the virtues of free trade as the key to better international relations. In 1838 he and John Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, aimed at abolishing the unpopular Corn Laws, which protected landowners' interests by levying taxes on imported wheat and raising the price of bread; as a Member of Parliament from 1841 he fought against opposition from the Peel ministry, and abolition was achieved in 1846.