The European Diaries of Richard Cobden, 1846–1849

Book excerpt: An account of the European vision of one of the most influential statesmen and thinkers of the nineteenth-century. This edition of the previously unpublished travel diaries of the M.P. and economic writer Richard Cobden (1804-1865) is not only a revealing account of Anglo-European politics before, during and after the year of revolutions, but is also a travel guide to Europe in the pre-railway age and a contribution to the intellectual biography of an English provincial radical who became a major European celebrity, one of the founders of Free Trade. During his extensive continental travels Cobden met most of the monarchs and leading statesmen of Europe, as well as artists, writers, churchmen and fellow-travellers. His tour through France, Spain, the Italian states, Austria, Prussia, Russia and the Hanseatic ports let him witness the struggles between order and progress which led to and succeeded the great upheavals of 1848. The diaries reveal Cobden in a new light - a determined European, convinced that economic cooperation and not protectionism and militarism was the only way to preserve international stability.