The Corn Laws were a number of tariffs on corn, wheat, and other grains that benefited United Kingdom landowners but antagonized those in Britain who needed to buy those grains.

Between 1815 and 1846, the government of the U.K. enacted a series of tariffs and other restrictions on food and grains imported from other countries. These were called the Corn Laws, wherein the authors used "corn" as a catch-all word to describe a number of cereal grains, including barley and wheat. In effect, importers could not get any corn or other grains from abroad unless the price of domestically produced corn fell to a set amount. As a result, the producers of domestic grains continued to enjoy a good return on their production; this was good for the overall domestic economy because the money that people paid for that domestically produced grain went to farmers in the U.K., not in other countries. Also as a result, however, the price of food remained artificially high, at basically levels seen during the Napoleonic Wars; after the end of those wars, however, consumers of "corn" found no reason to pay such a high price for food staples but did so because they would starve otherwise and, in so doing, spent less money on other things that they needed, like housing and clothing. And because people in the lower classes were not spending as much money on other things as they had been, revenues in other areas of the economy dropped. The passage and maintenance of these laws caused varying levels of civil distress, including riots in London in 1815, right after the laws went into effect.

The Corn Laws were an example of the kind of disconnect that inspired the Reform Acts of the 19th Century. As a result of the laws, unemployment increased in all sectors of the economy. But because many of the Members of Parliament were landowners who were profiting handsomely from the artificially high price of food, they were unwilling to do away with the Corn Laws because doing so would mean a reduction in their income. That the poor and lower middle class were struggling was not as important to many MPs as was their economic bottom line.

The first crack in the Corn Laws protection wall came in 1828, when Parliament, under Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington, introduced a sliding scale for the price of domestic "corn." The price that food had to be was reduced, but this action created no real depreciation in the amount of economic suffering being endured by many of the U.K.'s poor at this time.

The passage of the Reform Act 1832 resulted in an increase in the number of middle class voters and in the awareness of Parliament in those voters' needs. Opponents of the Corn Laws formed a political organization called the Anti-Corn-Law League (ACLL); in 1841, two members of this league won seats in Parliament and took every opportunity to voice their concerns to the new Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel. The membership and strength of the ACLL grew during the next few years; however, the interests of the wealthy were still predominant.

Peel tried to please both sides in 1842 by introducing yet another sliding scale, along the lines of the one tried by Wellington 14 years earlier, and an income tax; in addition, the Peel government reduced tariffs across the boards, with the biggest reduction coming on foreign manufactured goods.

In 1845, a potato blight devastated the Irish crop, creating the Irish Potato Famine, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of people and the emigration of many others. The very next year, in May, Parliament repealed the Corn Laws. Despite the House of Commons majority's voting for the repeal, Peel faced such a backlash from his own political party, the Conservatives, that he resigned as Prime Minister.

The removal of the high price standard for cereal grains resulted in a drop in the domestic price and an increase in the amount of such grains imported from other countries. The overall drop in price meant that more people who had less money could afford to spend money on things other than food; this led to an increase in the standard of living for a number of economic classes. During the next three decades, however, the drop in price took its toll on the landowners who had enjoyed such high profits in the early part of the 19th Century. People who had industrial jobs had improved their lives, but farmers struggled in turn and many sold their farms and moved to cities, there to join the new industrial economy.