RICARDO, John Lewis (1812-1862), of Exbury House, Fawley, Hampshire

‘A consistent Liberal and Free Trader’, best known for his assault on the navigation laws which protected British shipping, Ricardo possessed an ‘almost hereditary title to be heard’ on financial questions.1The Era, 24 Aug. 1862; Illustrated London News, x. 53 (23 Jan. 1847). His father was the London banker Jacob Ricardo and his uncle the famous economist David Ricardo (1772-1823), MP for Portarlington 1819-23.2HP Commons, 1820-1832, vi. 930-41. Originally a London merchant, after becoming an MP Ricardo developed extensive railway interests and founded the Electric Telegraph Company. His business career restricted his parliamentary contributions, although he was a prominent critic of government policy during the Crimean War.3Leeds Mercury, 21 Aug. 1862. His colleague Edward Leveson-Gower later recalled that Ricardo was ‘clever and amusing, but not ill-described as “Louis Ricardo, so full of bravado”’.4E. Leveson-Gower, Bygone years (1905), 239-40. However, another source noted ‘[al]though he was singularly unobtrusive, and rarely spoke in the House, his commercial experience, and his practical good sense, were always to be relied on in financial or trade matters’.5Morning Post, 22 Aug. 1862.

Although raised as an Anglican, Ricardo hailed from a family of Portuguese Jews who had settled in Amsterdam and later England.6Birmingham Daily Post, 25 Aug. 1862. In his youth he worked for his father’s firm. Through his marriage in 1841 he came into possession of ‘considerable property’ in Elgin.7Gent. Mag. (1862), ii. 496-7. Ricardo was elected in first place for Stoke-on-Trent in 1841, having apparently spent a ‘good deal of money’ to establish an interest.8Morning Post, 18 June 1841. In Parliament, Ricardo opposed the corn laws as a matter of course, and displayed his uncle’s intellectual influence by contending that ‘protection to agriculture means protection to rents’, 21 June 1842.9Hansard, 21 July 1842, vol. 65, c. 437. Ricardo pressed for free trade generally. In 1843 and 1844 he moved unsuccessfully for Britain to revise its import duties without reference to the policies of other countries. This was because Ricardo believed that unilateral action by the government would be a more effective way of promoting free trade between nations than continuing the system of reciprocal commercial treaties.10Hansard, 25 Apr. 1843, vol. 68, cc. 902-13, 970-1; 19 Mar. 1844, vol. 73, cc. 1270-9. In 1845, Ricardo called for the equalisation of the duties on foreign and colonial sugar, rejecting arguments that it would boost the importation of slave-grown produce.11Hansard, 24 Feb. 1845, vol. 77, cc. 1073-8. Ricardo opposed attempts to regulate the hours that adults could work in factories, including proposals for a ten hour day.

Ricardo subsequently emerged as a leading critic of the navigation laws, which regulated and protected British shipping, ‘battering them heavily with Parliamentary shot and pamphleteering shell’.12Morning Post, 22 Aug. 1862. He first raised the issue when seconding the address to the Queen’s speech, 19 Jan. 1847, and his motion for a select committee on the navigation laws was passed 155-61, 9 Feb. 1847.13Hansard, 19 Jan. 1847, vol. 89, cc. 72-6; 9 Feb. 1847, vol. 89, cc. 1007-19, 1058. On the latter occasion Ricardo expressed his credo that ‘it was impossible to create trade by laws. No code of laws which human wisdom could devise could operate as well as the natural laws which regulated trade and commerce’.14Ibid., 1011. Ricardo topped the poll at the 1847 general election after promising that he would not rest ‘while there shall remain a rag of Protection’, singling out the navigation laws as the ‘most onerous, unfair, and unjust species of monopoly’.15Staffordshire Advertiser, 17, 24 July 1847. The select committee published its evidence, but produced no report, but Ricardo made his own conclusions known through his polemical The anatomy of the navigation laws (1847), in which he dismissed the navigation laws as a ‘relic’ of shipowners, arguing that at best they were an irrelevance and at worst a hindrance to British shipping, which had nothing to fear from free trade.16PP 1847 (232), x. 2-3; 1847 (246), x. 180-1; 1847 (392), x. 205, 207; 1847 (556), x. 372-3; 1847 (678), x. 577; J.L. Ricardo, The anatomy of the navigation laws (1847), 52. In particular, Ricardo presented evidence that the volume of British shipping (as measured by ships and tonnage) had increased most in those markets not protected by the navigation laws, and he rejected the view that American ships were cheaper to build and operate (i.e. that they would undercut British ships under a free trade regime): ibid., 169-82, 203-15. Ricardo restated these arguments when supporting the Whig government’s 1849 bill to repeal the navigation laws.17Hansard, 14 Feb. 1849, vol. 102, cc. 724-6; 12 Mar. 1849, vol. 103, cc. 598-604.

After 1846, when he became chairman of the North Staffordshire Railway Company, Ricardo took an active interest in railway debates, including lobbying a parliamentary committee for legislation to allow his enterprise to take over the Birmingham Canal Company.18PP 1846 (275), xiii. 157-60; Hansard, 26, 29 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, cc. 208-9, 376; 6 Apr. 1846, vol. 85, c. 608; 10 June 1847, vol. 93, cc. 296-7. In 1850, Ricardo attempted to introduce a more orderly system of ‘general supervision or control’ over the railways, but withdrew his bill at the second reading after the intervention of Henry Labouchere, Whig president of the board of trade.19Hansard, 1 May 1850, vol. 110, cc. 1066-70, 1081. From 1846 Ricardo also deployed his ‘great administrative powers and general aptitude for business’ as founder and chairman of the Electric Telegraph Company (ETC).20Gent. Mag. (1862), ii. 497. Ricardo was part of a consortium which had purchased the patents for the electric telegraph in October 1845.21R.N. Barton, ‘New media: the birth of telegraphic news in Britain, 1847-68’, Media History, 16 (2010), 379-405 (at 381). See also R.N. Barton, ‘Construction of the network society: evolution of the electric telegraph, 1837-1869’, University of London Ph. D thesis (2007). After building the necessary infrastructure, the ETC’s national network opened in January 1848. Ricardo’s ‘vision’ was of using telegraphic cables to provide financial and commercial news to businessmen and stock exchanges across the country and also transmit telegrams. Losses in the early years scared off many of the other investors, enabling Ricardo to consolidate his control.22Barton, ‘Telegraphic news’, 382-4. The Company’s network also allowed provincial newspapers to get daily parliamentary reports.23Ibid., 387. Ricardo’s other innovations included introducing female clerks and ready-franked message papers.24Gent. Mag. (1862), ii. 497. In 1852, Ricardo unsuccessfully opposed legislation to assist the rival British Electric Telegraph Company, but denied that he was seeking to protect his own monopoly.25Hansard, 12 Mar. 1852, vol. 119, cc. 961-2.

Although his business career restricted his parliamentary contributions, Ricardo remained an active member. Despite his Anglicanism, Ricardo had told his constituents in 1847 that ‘he was opposed to Church monopoly as well as all other monopolies’, and generally cast votes in favour of religious liberty, including Jewish emancipation and further Catholic relief.26Staffordshire Advertiser, 24 July 1847. A staunch opponent of the ‘taxes on knowledge’¸ on a number of occasions Ricardo criticised the state’s inconsistency and unfairness in prosecuting some newspapers for not paying stamp duty, but not others.27Hansard, 12 May 1852, vol. 121, cc. 607-10; 14 Mar. 1853, vol. 125, cc. 163-4; 14 Apr. 1853, vol. 125, cc. 1168-9. Ricardo had long believed that income tax should be differentiated (modified to reflect different types of income), but his membership of the 1851-2 select committee changed his mind, and thereafter he opposed any alteration, which, he argued, would only create new anomalies and injustices.28PP 1851 (563), x. 340-1; 1852 (354), ix. 2-3; Hansard, 28 Apr. 1853, vol. 126, c. 711; Birmingham Daily Post, 25 Aug. 1862. At the 1852 general election, when he topped the poll, Ricardo declared that ‘the Reform Bill of Lord John Russell will not do’, having already signalled his support for radical political reform by voting for Joseph Hume’s ‘little Charter’ in 1848, 1850, and 1852.29Staffordshire Advertiser, 3 Apr. 1852.

After the outbreak of the Crimean War in March 1854, Ricardo became a leading critic of government policy. He shared the view of many Radicals that the incompetence of the war’s prosecution was due to aristocratic exclusiveness, writing after the fall of Aberdeen’s coalition, 26 Jan. 1855:

Things have come to a most dismal pass politically. We have engaged in a disastrous war without a ministry at the moment. ... whatever may be the composition of the new ministry they will have plenty of Dukes, Lords & Baronets but they will most carefully eschew any man of business. There is not a clerk in Manchester or the City of London that would not have known how to supply the army with what it wanted.30John Lewis Ricardo to George Wilson, 26 Jan. 1855, George Wilson papers, Greater Manchester County Record Office, M20, vol. 22.

More specifically, in Parliament and in his pamphlet The war policy of commerce (1855), Ricardo counselled against the government restricting Anglo-Russian trade through a blockade or other measures.31J.L. Ricardo, The war policy of commerce (1855); Hansard, 17 Mar. 1854, vol. 131, c. 970; 20 Feb. 1855, vol. 136, cc. 1699-1702. He dismissed the attempt ‘to carry on the war by the taxation of the country’, as ‘an utter, unmixed, and irretrievable failure’, 19 Mar. 1855, a judgment vigorously disputed by William Gladstone, the chancellor of the exchequer.32Hansard, 19 Mar. 1855, vol. 137, cc. 818, 827. Ricardo forced Palmerston to admit that the British and French governments had agreed to jointly guarantee a £5 million loan to Turkey, their ally in the war, 25 June 1855.33Hansard, 25 June 1855, vol. 139, c. 79. Believing that the Commons had abdicated its responsibility for overseeing the government’s financial policy, Ricardo opposed the Turkish loan, but it was narrowly passed 135-132, 20 July 1855.34Hansard, 20 July 1855, vol. 139, cc. 1216-22, 1269-70.

Although Ricardo had been a noted athlete in his youth, he was never a well man, and was often laid up with gout.35Gent. Mag. (1862), ii. 497; Ricardo to Wilson, 3 Apr. 1847, 10 Mar. 1851, George Wilson papers, GMCRO, M20, vols. 11, 17. Despite his general attachment to the Liberal party, Ricardo endorsed the Canton motion which brought down Palmerston’s government, 3 Mar. 1857. At the subsequent general election, when he was returned in second place, Ricardo was unrepentant, telling electors that ‘if I had to vote again tomorrow on the same question I should vote in the same way’.36Staffordshire Advertiser, 28 Mar. 1857. He was re-elected again in 1859.

In his last years in Parliament, Ricardo pressed for the abolition of the Stade tolls on trade between Britain and Hanover and took an interest in legislation affecting the Staffordshire pottery and extractive industries, including voicing his constituents’ complaints about the mining operations of the Duchy of Lancaster.37Hansard, 11 May 1858, vol. 185, cc. 443-444, 455; 3 Mar. 1859, vol. 152, cc. 1172-3; 6 Feb. 1860, vol. 156, c. 560; 25 June 1860, vol. 159, cc. 1464-5; PP 1857-58 (429), xvii. 5; W.A.S. Hewins, rev. H.C.G. Mathew, ‘Ricardo, John Lewis (1812-1862)’, www.oxforddnb.com. Ricardo served on committees in 1860 and 1861, whose reports, which respectively vindicated the repeal of the navigation laws and rejected any adjustment of income tax, were in line with his views.38PP 1860 (530), xiii. 3-34; 1861 (503), vii. 1, 3-4.

From the mid-1850s, Ricardo lost control of the ETC board, who were increasingly receptive to their competitors’ offers to form a cartel to fix prices. He retired as chairman in 1856, when he was presented with 1,000 volumes of books by employees, but returned to the position. However, Ricardo was at odds with his board, and came to believe that nationalisation of the telegraphic system would better secure the public interest than a cartel of commercial companies.39F. Boase, Modern English biography (1901), iii. 131; Gent. Mag. (1862), ii. 496; Barton, ‘Telegraphic news’, 389-93. Ricardo died in harness at the age of 50 in August 1862. His personal effects were sworn under £50,000 and passed to his widow, who died in December 1869.40Calendar of Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration (1862), 188. Ricardo was succeeded by his only child Augustus Louis Ricardo, a captain in the Grenadier guards, who died without issue in 1871.41Burke’s landed gentry (1879), ii. 1348. Ricardo’s letters survive in the Grey papers at Durham University Library and the George Wilson papers held by Greater Manchester County Record Office, which are especially illuminating on his business career.