The Peace Campaigns of Richard Cobden

Statesman Richard Cobden was a leading figure in the nineteenth-century international peace movement with a vast network of fellow activists. In this lecture, Professor Simon Morgan uses the new publicly accessible database of Cobden’s letters to follow his activities (www.cobdenletters.org).

Richard Cobden is well known to some as the leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, which aimed to bring cheap food to the masses and to promote freedom of trade. However, it is less well-known that he was a leading peace activist and one of the main figures of the international peace movement, working alongside celebrities such as author Victor Hugo and scientist Alexander Von Humboldt

In this lecture, Professor Morgan charts Cobden’s peace activism through the recently created ‘Letters of Richard Cobden Online’ – an open access database containing transcripts of around 5,500 of Cobden’s letters. The lecture ranges from Cobden’s involvement in the Peace Congress movement of the 1840s and early 1850s and his principled opposition to the Crimean War, to his critiques of Britain’s imperial wars and his efforts to keep Britain from meddling in the American Civil War.

As Professor Morgan demonstrates, contemporary accusations that Cobden believed in ‘peace at any price’ were wide of the mark. His close contacts with serving army officers gave him valuable insights into military affairs, while his strictures on Lord Palmerston’s expenditure on coastal defences and obsolete naval vessels were underpinned by a lively interest in modern naval technology.