Richard Cobden
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Richard Cobden’
Richard Cobden asked Parliament to make a better effort to understand the Russian mindset.
Back in 1801, Napoleon almost persuaded Tsar Paul I to invade India. Further lobbying fell on deaf ears but many in London still believed Russia was poised to invade India, and even Western Europe. After pre-emptive wars in Afghanistan (1838-42) and the Crimea (1853-56), Richard Cobden urged Westminster to get to know Russia better.
Richard Cobden despaired at British statesmen using the peerless Royal Navy merely to strangle trade in other countries.
The Victorian era saw Britain abandon its colonial ‘single market’ in favour of much greater free trade, but Richard Cobden was not yet satisfied. He urged Parliament to stop using the navy to blockade the ports of its commercial and political rivals – in modern terms, to stop imposing sanctions and punitive tariffs.
Richard Cobden saw Britain’s international standing in terms of peaceful trade rather than military interventions.
In 1855, Cobden urged Parliament to tone down its anti-Russian rhetoric, not out of any fondness for St Petersburg’s domestic or foreign policy but because British influence was better felt in industrial innovation and international trade than in annexing land, toppling governments or rattling the Russian bear’s cage.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden believed British politicians supporting the slave-owning American South had been led a merry dance.
Richard Cobden MP had considerable sympathy with the Confederate States in the American Civil War of 1861-1865, as he regarded Washington as arrogantly meddlesome and corrupted by big business. But in 1863 he held up a report from the US Congress and told his Rochdale constituents that the South’s politicians had forfeited any right to an Englishman’s goodwill.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden offered a startling analogy for the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republicans won the US general election in 1860, prompting eleven slave-owning southern States to declare independence. Some in Westminster sympathised, saying the national result did not reflect the majority of southern voters – but Richard Cobden was scornful.
Victorian MP Richard Cobden pleaded for Britain to set the world an example as a nation open for business.
Richard Cobden MP urged Queen Victoria’s Parliament to embrace a policy of global free trade, instead of the over-regulated, over-taxed trade deals brokered by politicians and their friends behind closed doors. It was, he said, nothing less than the next step in Britain’s destiny, and her Christian duty.