The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850The elemental power of food politics has not been fully appraised. Food marketing and consumption were matters of politics as much as economics as England became a market society. In times of dearth, concatenations of food riots, repression, and relief created a maturing politics of provisions. Over three centuries, some eight hundred riots crackled in waves across England. Crowds seized wagons, attacked mills and granaries, and lowered prices in marketplaces or farmyards. Sometimes rioters parleyed with magistrates. More often both acted out a well-rehearsed political minuet that evolved from Tudor risings and state policies down to a complex culmination during the Napoleonic Wars. 'Provision politics' thus comprised both customary negotiations over scarcity and hunger, and 'negotiations' of the social vessel through the turbulence of dearth. Occasionally troops killed rioters, or judges condemned them to the gallows, but increasingly riots prompted wealthy citizens to procure relief supplies. In short, food riots worked: in a sense they were a first draft of the welfare state. This pioneering analysis connects a generation of social protest studies spawned by E.P. Thompson's essay on the 'moral economy' with new work on economic history and state formation. The dynamics of provision politics that emerged during England's social, economic and political transformations should furnish fruitful models for analyses of 'total war' and famine as well as broader transitions elsewhere in world history. |
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ABirmG action Adrian Randall Agrarian Agricultural April Assize bakers Basingstoke Birmingham Black Country bread Britain British Cambridge Charles Tilly colliers Community Politics consumers corn Cornwall Country crises crowds dealers dearth orders DerbyM Devon E.P. Thompson Early Modern England Eighteenth Century England English Hunger Riots engrossing exports Famine farmers flour food rioters food riots food supplies force forestalling grain granaries hanged harvest Hindle Ibid industrial John Walter justices Labouring London LondonCh magistrates Maldon Manchester March market-dependent marketplace merchants militia mills miners Moral Economy negotiations NorthptonM officials Oxford parish parliamentary boroughs paternalist Paul Slack Policy politics of provisions Poor Law Popular Protest population Privy Council provision politics Public Quarter Sessions Randall regrating Revolution riotous Riots and Community Rogers rural seized September 1800 Sharp Sheffield shipments Slack Society starved subscriptions subsistence Thompson Thwaites tinners towns trade troops Tudor Urban wages wheat William workers Wretched Faces Wrightson Yeomanry