PLEASE, MC EBENEZER, DON'T HURT 'EM:

[T]he best hip-hop, when you strip away the music, is just poetry. And 2Pac, like other brilliant rappers, used their poetry as a vehicle for change.

During the early-to-mid 1800s, a group of British poets similarly marshalled their talents for a purpose: to build a democratic movement against the "Corn Laws," a set of government policies sponsored by landowning aristocrats--the "one percent" of their day--to pad their pockets.

With protesters howling and wailing at the steps of British Parliament, the first consequential "Corn Law" was passed in 1815. The law aimed to keep the price of essential grains like wheat, barley, and oats high by blocking a flood of cheaper grains from abroad, inevitable as the war against Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's France was drawing to a close.

The net effect of this law, known as the "Importation Act" of 1815, was not lost on average British citizens: it was a tax on the masses to benefit the few, immiserating the poor with higher food prices in order to serve a landowning oligarchy with a stranglehold over the government. As the bill wiggled its slimy way through the British House of Commons in March 1815, there were violent riots in the streets--and the government even deployed the military to protect legislators.

Despite popular opposition and organized resistance, not only did parliament pass the Importation Act, they maintained the policy for decades to come--keeping the cost of living high for British society in order to serve the politically powerful few.

The injustice of the Corn Laws--and the boneheaded economics behind it--inspired a generation of British intellectuals in the social sciences and arts who engaged in a war of words for reform. One of the leading poets of the day was Ebenezer Elliott--a "conscious rapper," if the nineteenth century ever had one. MC Ebenezer, a successful businessman and idealist based in Sheffield, penned a series of poems called the "Corn Law Rhymes," which were published in 1831 by the Sheffield Mechanics' Anti-Bread-Tax Society, an activist organization that he helped found.

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