The Politics of Provisions
Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550-1850
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.
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http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9780754665816
John Bohstedt
Professor Bohstedt teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Modern Britain and Ireland and on Riots and Revolutions in Western Europe and the United States. His book and articles on riots have been widely cited in studies of Russian, Dutch, German, Japanese, and Indian, as well as British and American history. He has won major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander Humboldt Stiftung (Bonn), the British Academy, the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, the ACLS and American Philosophical Society, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. He led an international team from the US and Germany in a comparative study of "The Politics of Provisions: Riots, Repression and Welfare in England, France, and Germany, 1600-1900," from which will appear his forthcoming study " 'We'd Rather Be Hanged than Starved!' The Politics of Provisions in England, 1580-1867." He has presented invited papers at the International Conference on Hunger at NYU, at the Free University of Berlin, Emory University, Virginia Tech, London University, the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, and Sheffield, Harvard University, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy. He has given papers at the North American Conference on British Studies, the Social Science History Association, the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, and the American Historical Association. He has supervised a dozen Ph.D. and Master's dissertations and theses.