Corn Prices, Corn Models and Corn Rents: What Can We Learn from the English Corn Returns?

The Fisher Equation was not the first attempt to explore the interaction of money, wages and prices in economic life. The classical political economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also interested in elaborating these relationships, though they framed their investigations in different terms. Although Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Mill meant various things when they employed a ‘corn model’ of the macro-economy, they were nevertheless interested in understanding primitive accumulation and in characterizing the nature of rents. Their development of the notion of the ‘corn-price’ of labour was not arbitrary, but rather a reflection of their awareness of the fluctuating value of silver coinage, the reality that food costs were a large percentage of household budgets and the most immediate constraint to population growth, and the fact that they had access to long-term data series that allowed them to observe the volatility of wheat prices from the previous 700 years (Fleetwood, 1707; Smith, 1766). In the late seventeenth century, the regular collection of the prices of the leading ‘corns’ (which in the British Isles meant any kind of grain, but usually wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas and beans) became formalized in law.