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'''Sir Robert Peel''' (1788-1850) was a [[Great Britain|British]] [[Conservative]] politician who served as Prime Minister between 1841 in 1834-35 and again from 1841 to 1846. As [[Home Secretary]] he organized Britain's first modern police force, the [[Metropolitan Police]] in [[London]] in 1829 (to this day police officers are sometimes known as 'Bobbies' in his honor, and as 'Peelers' in Ireland). In 1846, as Prime Minister, he repealed the protectionist 'Corn Laws', enabling the importation of cheap foreign grain and a fall in the price of bread, but at the price of alienating his powerful landowning supporters. ==Historiography==Gash (1961, 1972) presented Peel as a leader who recognised the wisdom of appealing to the urban middle class as well as to the landowning class and the farmers; he argued that Peel, as a pragmatic administrator and a natural consensus politician, was the founder of modern Conservatism. However Boyd Hilton has argued that – far from being a pragmatist – Peel was a doctrinaire leader with an inelastic mind who was unwilling or unable to compromise on his views.  Scholars have advanced several explanations to resolve the puzzle of why Peel undertook the seemingly irrational decision to sacrifice his government to repeal the Corn Laws, a policy which he had long opposed. His actions were sensible, however, when viewed in the context of his concern for preserving aristocratic government and a limited franchise in the face of threats from popular unrest. Lusztig (1995) argues that Peel was primarily concerned with preserving the institutions of government, and he viewed reform as an occasional necessary evil. He acted to check the expansion of democracy by ameliorating conditions which could provoke democratic agitation. He also took care to assure that concessions would represent no threat to the British constitution.<ref> Michael Lusztig, "Solving Peel's Puzzle: Repeal of the Corn Laws and Institutional Preservation," ''Comparative Politics'' 1995 27(4): 393-408. </ref> ==Further reading==* Gash, Norman. ''Mr Secretary Peel'' (1961); ''Sir Robert Peel'' (1972), outsanding 2 vol. scholarly biography ====references====<references/>

[[Category:British History]]