A01=John Bohstedt
Aris's Birmingham Gazette
Aris’s Birmingham Gazette
assemblies
Author_John Bohstedt
buchanan
Capital Punishment
Category=JB
Category=N
Category=NH
Corn Bill
Corn Committee
crowd behaviour studies
Douglas Hay
early modern England
economic history analysis
economy
Eoin Magennis
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
famine response strategies
food
Great Famine
historical food scarcity politics
joan
Joan Thirsk
John Newdigate
Kingswood Colliers
moral
Moral Economy
Parliamentary Boroughs
Provision Politics
riotous
riots
Roger Wells
sharp
Sir John Newdigate
social protest movements
Soup Kitchens
Soup Shops
Spa Fields Riots
Steam Ships
thirsk
Town Hall
Veteran Communities
Vice Versa
welfare state origins
Wretched Faces
Yeomanry Cavalry
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9781138257696
- Weight: 800g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 11 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
John Bohstedt is Professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, and author of Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790-1810.
