The Corn Laws were repealed because the rising industrial class wanted cheap food to keep wages low, and cheap grain imports did indeed push British agriculture away from arable farming towards more pastoral and dairy-focused systems. But studying this in an Indian textbook, I see it as a colonial turning point too—your cheap food came from our ruined fields. It's the same tune, just a different scale: here, Subir-da teaches harmonium, his son calls from Mumbai, and the price of our own rice keeps climbing. So, the real change in British agriculture was that it learned to feast on the harvests of others.
#food
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