The Politics of Provisions : Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850

The ''politics of provisions'' - forceful negotiations over sustenance - has created surprising contests in world history, particularly in times of market transition. In England a ''politics of provisions'' evolved in a dialogue between popular riots and paternalist subsistence policies from Tudor dearths to the Victorian embrace of free-market doctrines. Hence provision politics was a core ingredient of both state-formation and of the emergence of the first market economy and society in England. This book is the first full-scale critical revision of E.P. Thompson''s seminal model of the ''moral economy of the crowd'', which has had huge influence across the social sciences. It is the first synthesis of the many dispersed studies of three centuries of marketing and negotiations by riot over subsistence. By explaining such long-term shifts in patterns of political negotiation from parish-pump to Privy Council, this study offers a new view of why food riots were a more compelling and lasting bone of contention than enclosures, wages or votes.

The 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.