This interesting collection of fifteen essays is the result of a conference at Dunford House, West Sussex, in July 2004, which commemorated the bicentennial of Richard Cobden's birth. Cobden is well known to historians, although perhaps not the general reader, as the most prominent member of the Anti-Corn-Law League and as a leading free-trade radical in early Victorian Britain. The stated purpose of these essays is to provide a reappraisal of the central ideas of Western liberalism through the career of Cobden, who is perceived throughout their pages as an exemplar of the “international man.” Somewhat less attention is paid to Cobden's views on the strengths of an unfettered market, the roles of the individual and the community, and the proper limits on the power of the state, although such ideas are woven into the fabric of several of the essays. The collection seeks less to rehabilitate Cobden's free-trade radicalism than to explain how and why it fell out of fashion in a Britain that became collectivist and a Europe in which internationalism tended to rely on institutional structures and collective security more than upon what one author calls Cobden's “unilateral internationalism” (287).

In the first section of the book, it is Cobden's rise to hero status that is considered. David Stock examines the puzzling relationship between Cobden and the phrenologist George Combe, arguing that Cobden's interest in phrenology was in the idea that there was a theoretical framework that made practical reforms possible by revealing a benevolent and moral design in the world. While Cobden regarded Combe as something of a mentor, he did not regard skull reading as scientific. For him, Combe's Constitution of Man provided the notion of a moral framework on which action should be based. Simon Morgan considers Cobden's rise from warehouse clerk to become the very personification of free trade, examining his early pamphlets, unsuccessful candidacy for Parliament at Stockport in 1837, and the famous flap in 1843 when he said the prime minister was personally responsible for the condition of the country in the wake of the murder of Peel's private secretary in a horrendous case of mistaken identity. Morgan may exaggerate the role this controversy played in making Cobden a celebrity. Cobden was already something of an anti–Corn Law “rock star” whose likeness appeared on plates, jugs, handkerchiefs, engravings, and even a figure at Madame Toussaud’s.

Three essays examine Cobden in relation to liberal politics. In an important essay, Roland Quinault argues that Cobden was a leading architect of modern parliamentary democracy, supporting household suffrage, the ballot, shorter parliaments, and curbs on the House of Lords from the outset of his career. Cobden's connections to the complete suffrage movement while the Anti-Corn-Law League was in operation remain somewhat unexplored, however. In a fascinating essay, F. M. L. Thompson traces Cobden's support for “free trade in land” and how the league's efforts to increase the number of freehold electors—by buying tracts of land and then selling portions of them to free-trade supporters—ended up as the Abbey National building society. David Brown's contribution on Cobden and the press investigates Cobden's involvement with several newspapers in various radical strongholds in the 1850s, such as the Standard of Freedom and the Morning Star, during which time he advocated rather tirelessly nonintervention abroad. The league probably developed a considerable network of newspaper connections, and Cobden may have simply been carrying on this tradition; but the loss of their financial records, when J. B. Smith burned them at the insistence of his wife while moving house, lost them to posterity.

The theme of the third section is Cobden's influence and perception in “Liberal Europe.” The redoubtable Alex Tyrrell considers Cobden and La Lique Francaise, making the point that the very name Anti-Corn-Law League was regarded as typically British in its limited pragmatism and that it would be the task of France, which regarded itself, after all, as the intellectual capital of the world, to take the broader principles of free trade across the globe. But the efforts of French political economists and their supporters were eclipsed by the events of 1848 and thereafter took on a new form. Roberto Romani considers the role of Cobden in the Italian risorgimento. While Cobden held definite views on Italian politics, mostly shaped by his notion of public spirit, he was unable to do more than superimpose his opinions on the nationalist agenda. Detlev Mares explains how although Cobden was admired, the Manchester form of liberalism, with its heavy emphasis on laissez-faire, was problematic in Germany, as it seemed to reject any other remedy for social ills. Greek responses to Richard Cobden are the subject of the essay by Pandeleimon Hinonidis, who makes the point that Cobden's appeal to Greek liberals and political economists was very much a function of how his ideas were received in academic rather than popular circles.

Richard Cobden as “International Man” is the subject of three engaging essays. In the first of these, Keith Robbins suggests that Cobden was the embodiment of the major developments of his age. He was born in the preindustrial heartland of rural Sussex, began a career in the metropolis, became famous and successful in the industrial hub of Manchester in the north, and moved on to international relations in his negotiations with France. Cobden, argues Robbins, was at the nexus of the old world and the new, where interstate relations began to intersect with international ones. Martin Ceadel, a political scientist at Oxford, examines Cobden's devotion to the cause of peace, saying he wrote on causes of peace at the outset of his public life, emerged as a free-trade internationalist during the years of the league, and then embarked on a tour of Europe during which he linked the causes of financial reform and peace, seeing military reductions as central to both retrenchment and nonintervention. The literature of the league and Cobden's speeches during their agitations reveal that such notions were already firmly linked in Cobden's mind before his European tour, however. An American economist, Stephan Meardon, examines the “trilemma” of peace, free trade, and antislavery in Cobden's views on the American Civil War. While John Bright favored vigorous prosecution of the war by the North, Cobden was somewhat less so because of the quandary, although he developed a close friendship with Charles Sumner, which forms a very interesting portion of this essay.

Three historians assess Cobden's legacy in quite distinct fashions in the remaining essays. Sarah Richardson examines the lives of two of Cobden's daughters, Jane and Anne, demonstrating not just how kinship ties and friendship networks served as a foundation for their political activities, but how such connections were fundamental to their engagement in such issues as suffrage extension for women and justice for Ireland. Jane's marriage to the publisher T. Fisher Unwin, for example, led to the publication of two books on causes that were dear to her father's heart, the struggle for cheap bread and the hunger for land. Donald Winch considers the career of Louis Mallet as one in which a public servant had internalized Cobden's principles, motivated by a conviction that there was a harmony of moral and economic law and that socialism was but the most recent manifestation of a selfish, class-based, protectionist mentality. Finally, Frank Trentmann outlines the stages of what he calls Cobden's resurrection and decomposition, writing that Cobden's stock rose and that he obtained hero status during the imperialist assault on free trade at the turn of the last century, that it declined after World War I when his brand of internationalism fell out of vogue in favor of more coordinated and regulated institution-based cooperation, and that it has sporadically fluctuated with the reappearance of libertarian networks since World War II. Today, says Trentmann, there is a Cobden amnesia, although he survives where personalized narratives of freedom are popular or the general libertarian cult of the individual prevails—in other words, in America.

This collection manages to examine some of the major themes of radical reform that shaped nineteenth-century liberalism, to broaden the impact of Cobdenism on Europe, and to consider some of the contested elements of his legacy. One is surprised, however, to see no contribution from Miles Taylor, who knows the Cobden correspondence better than perhaps anyone. The scholarship that supports these essays is almost uniformly impressive, and the historiographical placement of each essay is thorough and up to date. The intended audience for this volume is academic, and scholars of liberalism, international relations, and nineteenth-century politics will read these essays profitably. It ought to be in every university library. One could argue that there is over-reliance on Cobden's letters and that the mountain of printed material from his League days in particular has been overlooked, but such omissions change the timing much more than the trust of what these essays have to say.

Sometimes the cover of a book can contribute to its contents. The centrality of liberty in Cobden's thought and action deserves more attention than it receives here. He saw the Corn Laws as the keystone in the arch of aristocratic misrule that sustained monopoly not only in grain, but in political participation, religious domination, militarism, and the land itself. The cover of this splendid collection is adorned by one of the engravings of Richard Cobden, John Bright, and George Wilson that was offered for sale to the free-trade faithful. In it, prosperity places a laurel atop Cobden's head while peace looks on. But above all of this is the red cap of liberty. This collection reminds us that Richard Cobden played a central role in the making of liberalism and that he saw liberty as having implications for international relations, political participation, prosperity, and the role of the state itself.