Customs in Common, page 38
See for example George Rudé, Protest and Punishment (Oxford, 1978), p. 57, who says that food riot “played little part” before 1829-31.
These examples were collected in a pamphlet published by the Foreign Office and Irish Office, Famine in Ireland, 1740-41 (1847).
Gentleman’s Magazine, May (1757).
Wesley’s Journal, 27 May 1758.
Thus the “classical” food riot was certainly known to the eighteenth-century Irish, and it may be under-reported in general histories. If food riot failed to prevent exports and to relieve famine (as in 1740-1) this might account for a weakening of the tradition as the century wore on.1 And one can only speculate as to the reasons for the divergent national traditions. Perhaps food rioters had less “political” clout in Ireland, since they did not threaten in the same direct way the stability and “face” of a resident governing gentry. Nor (in the absence of poor laws) did they stimulate in the same way an apparatus of relief, nor even (despite some examples) of gentry charity.2
But food riots are reported in 1792, Samuel Clark and J. S. Donnelly (eds.), Irish Peasants (Manchester, 1983), p. 55; and in 1793, C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), p. 196 (counties Cork and Waterford).
See L. M. Cullen and T. C. Smout, Comparative Aspects of Scottish and Irish Economic and Social History (Edinburgh, 1977), p. 10 and ch. 2.
Thus in Ireland food riots did not “work”, partly because there was no political space (as in England) within which the plebs could exert pressure on their rulers. Arguing backwards from these cases we may pass the English evidence under review once more. Twenty years ago the notion that food riots could have served any positive function could scarcely gain the attention of historians. Smithian doctrine saw them as examples of social malfunction, while also postulating harvest short-fall (FAD) as sufficient explanation for most surges in the price of grain. What one scholar has called “an anachronistic reading of early modern society as a market society marked by the triumph of economic individualism”, has given credibility to “a Malthusian model of social and economic change”, which proposes an unproblematic and un-mediated relationship between harvest, price, and (until the seventeenth century) mortality.3
John Walter, “The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England”, in John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds.), Famine, Disease, and the Social Order in Early Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 82, 121.
But recent advances in historical demography are now showing us a more complex set of events. A. B. Appleby clearly identified regional famine in the north-west in 1596-7 and 1622-3, and raised in interesting ways the question as to why the rest of England had managed to escape starvation. Several cogent reasons have been proposed for the difference in the “ecology of famine” between the north-west and the south. And to these may be added the differential effectiveness of measures of relief, which ensured that what little surplus grain was available was brought to market or transferred at subsidised rates to those in most need. The Book of Orders may have had more than symbolic functions and (with the aid of poor relief and charities) have mitigated the effects of dearth in the south, whereas the north-western region was not only pastoral and corn-poor, it also lacked the administrative and financial structures to set the Book of Orders in motion.1
John Walter and Roger Schofield, “Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality in Early Modern Society”, in ibid., p. 47.
Wrigley and Schofield’s important Population History of England enables us to pursue these arguments further. While it is usually argued that the threat of famine had passed from England by 1650, a weak relation between grain prices and mortality can be shown until 1745. A weak relation (when generalised across the nation) might mask sharp local crises, or differential mortality in which the excess deaths fell chiefly among “the poor”, or certain exposed groups. Moreover, the threat of famine had not moved far away. Wrigley and Schofield examine a sample of 404 parishes between 1541 and 1871 for years in which the death rate in many parishes was markedly above trend; 1727-9 and 1741-2, which are dearth and riot years, appear high on the table (with death rates from 30 to 40 per cent above trend), although other riot years — 1709, 1757, and 1795 — do not.2 But these cannot be confidently identified as local subsistence crises, since epidemics may have caused the high mortality.3
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population of England, 1541-1871 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), p. 653. The riot years 1766-7 show a death rate 10.4% above trend.
See ibid., pp. 668-9.
These are complex questions. For the purposes of our argument it is sufficient to note that local crises persist into the eighteenth century, that harvest shortfall or high prices have a differential impact upon different (even neighbouring) communities, and that insignificant movements in national statistical series may mask very sharp local suffering. Moreover, “by far the highest overall incidence of [local] crisis mortality occurred in the south-west, in an area extending from south Gloucestershire and west Wiltshire through Dorset to Devon”: i.e. precisely one of the strongest food riot areas in the eighteenth century.1
Ibid., p. 692.
This suggests that rioters had good reasons for concern, and for actions in self-defence. And that in high-price years they were pressed close to a margin, so that even small modifications of their market situation might make a mortal difference. There were many ways of obtaining subsistence, not all of which depended upon the market,2 and in emergency “the poor” were not altogether without resources. A correspondent writing from “a manufacturing neighbourhood” in the West at a time of low employment and high prices (1741), concluded:
See John Walter, “The Social Economy of Dearth”, a good deal of which still applies in the early eighteenth century.
The poor every month grow poorer, for their clothes apparently wear into rags and they are in no capacity of buying new ones. They have sold almost all their little superfluities already, or perhaps one had a gold ring, another two or three pewter dishes, a third a brass pot or kettle; these they have been disposing of to buy bread for themselves and families. . .3
“Philo-Georgius” to duke of Newcastle, 7 Dec. 1741, Brit. Lib. Add MS 32, 698, f. 496.
That is not (yet) a crisis of subsistence, but it is the context for chronic malnutrition.
One should not misread “entitlement theory” to conclude that there were no such things as failures of grain supply, and that every dearth is man-made. What Sen shows is that, given a shortfall in harvest, the way in which the supply is distributed between social groups is decidedly man-made, and depends upon choices between means of allocation, of which market price is only one among many. Even in times of dearth there was always some supply, and the problem was how to squeeze this surplus out of granaries and barns and direct it to those in most need.1 The measures comprised in the Book of Orders worked reasonably well, and it is not clear why they lapsed after 1630. In a clearly-argued essay, Dr Outhwaite has suggested that the complexity and inefficiency of their operation resulted in “disenchantment”.2 But interest and ideology might also be awarded a role, as the market oriented, cereal-growing landed classes became more influential in the state. For long periods after 1660 the problem was not dearth but abundant production, low prices and rent arrears, and mercantilist theory was preoccupied with cereal export (and bounties). In such conditions the Tudor measures of provision lay dormant, although they were not forgotten in high-price years. In 1693 in Oxfordshire the crowd took the corn “as it was carrying away by the ingrossers, saying they were resolved to put the law in execution since the magistrates neglected it”.3 “Some of our rioters” (a dealer wrote in 1766) “have been so infatuated as to think they were only assisting the execution of wholesome laws. . .”4
Professor Sen continues to lay great stress on the political context of famine in the twentieth century. Governments which are accountable to public opinion are more likely to exert themselves in relief measures than those which are not, and “it is hard to find a case in which a famine has occurred in a country with a free press and an active opposition within a democratic system”: Amartya Sen, “Individual Freedom as a Social Commitment”, New York Review of Books, 14 June, 1990.
Outhwaite, “Dearth and Government Intervention”, p. 404.
The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, Antiquary of Oxford, 1632-95, ed. A. Clark, cited in W. Thwaites, “The Corn Market and Economic Change: Oxford in the 18th Century”, Midland History (forthcoming).
Reflections on the Present High Price of Provisions, p. 27.
What may have eased the abrogation of the Book of Orders was the growing effectiveness of the poor laws in providing an institutional safety-net for those with a settlement. The responsibility which the central authorities refused was taken back to the parish or to the urban corporation. And alongside this limited relief, in times of dearth the local traditions of charity had more vitality than they are sometimes credited with. In a sense the Tudor practices of “house-keeping” and of hospitality were extended into the eighteenth-century landed gentleman’s contest, through large gestures of “liberality”, for local influence.1
Much of what John Walter writes about seventeenth-century charities in time of dearth applies equally to the first seven decades of the eighteenth century: Walter, “Social Economy of Dearth”.
In every high-price year — at least until the 1760s — substantial landowners came forward in most parts of the country, sending corn at reduced rates to market as an example to others, selling off cheap grain at their gates, ordering their tenants to supply the market at moderate rates, entering into county agreements to reduce prices and to prosecute those who sold by sample, forestallers, etc., and so on. (By the 1780s and 1790s opinion was more divided, and those — like the earl of Warwick — who continued the old charitable gestures, tended to mark themselves out as traditional “Tory” paternalists.) This tradition of highly-visible charity may in part be ascribed to humanitarian motives and to an approved self-image of the gentry as protectors of the poor against heartless employers, mean parish overseers and grasping middlemen. But it was also a calculated stance in the culturally-constructed alliance between patricians and plebs against the middling orders, and it distracted attention from the landowners’ prosperity to point to prominent Dissenters and Quakers among the profiteering food dealers.2
So widespread was the abuse of Quaker dealers that the Friends issued a public statement in 1800: “The Society of Friends. . . having been for some time calumniated as oppressors of the laborious and indigent classes of the community, by combining to monopolize those necessary articles of life, Corn and Flour, think themselves called upon to vindicate their own innocence and integrity. . .”: Meetings for Sufferings, xl, pp. 404-6, 6 October 1800 (Friends House Library, London). My thanks to the Librarian, Malcolm Thomas.
Viewed from this aspect, poor laws and emergency charities were constituent components of the system of property and power. Indeed, subsidies and subscriptions can often be seen as direct moves to buy off riot, or even as a reward for not rioting.3 John Bohstedt has warned us:
In 1766 local gentry raised a subscription in Melksham “in consideration of the poor not having joined in the late riots which occurred all round the town”, and beef was distributed to over 1,600 poor persons. But the beef was given in November, months after the height of the crisis had passed. Dr Randall suggests that the riotous poor of Chippenham, Stroud, Frome or Bradford (Wiltshire) might have done better: A. J. Randall, “Labour and the Industrial Revolution in the West of England Woollen Industry” (Univ. of Birmingham Ph.D. thesis, 1979), p. 166.
It is not historically useful to separate the undoubted humanitarianism of these charities from their function in preserving class rule. Plebeian misery assaulted the conscience of the wealthy and challenged their capacity for remedy, just as it threatened to assault their property and challenge the legitimacy of their political monopoly.
In the 1790s “a waning ‘paternalism’. . . was merely thinly-disguised self-preservation”.1
Bohstedt, op. cit., pp. 96-7, 48. See also Peter Mandler’s discussion of the conversion of the landed gentry in these years from a weak paternalism which acknowledged the customary rights of the poor to a language of the “natural order” (as defined by Smith and by Malthus) in which “the only true natural right” is that of property: “The Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus”, Past and Present, 117 (November 1987).
From the 1790s this was the case, and the supposed threat of “Jacobinism” provided an additional spur. But in earlier decades one can perceive a kind of social bargain, less calculating and more unconscious — a kind of obligatory dues paid for the everyday exercise of hegemony. It gave a character of liberality to some country gentry which allows one to forgive them other sins. “In this sense”, John Walter has written, “years of dearth continued to provide an arena in which the nature of social responsibilities between the poor and their betters could be continually re-negotiated”. But over the longer course, what had been once perceived as reciprocal duties (and by the labourers as rights) became redefined as “discriminatory and discretionary charity”. If “the poor” escaped “vulnerability to crises of sub-subsistence” it was at the cost of becoming “enmeshed in a web of deference and dependence”.2 Yet if this is true of rural England — and perhaps of some towns — the record of food riot shows an alternative.
Walter, “Social Economy of Dearth”, pp. 127-8; Walter and Schofield, “Famine, Disease and Crisis Mortality”, p. 48.
In any case, relief measures cannot be shrugged off as only a matter of gestures or as an exercise in social control. There is reason to suppose that they may have mitigated crises of subsistence. If the margin between a poor subsistence and (for groups at risk) famine was small, then marginal redistribution to those in most need may have mattered enough to have shifted a demographic digit. Even between neighbouring towns the different profile of riot/relief might have influenced mortality. The patchwork of poor laws, charities, subsidies — even petty measures like limits upon malting, banning hair-powder, or commending austere diets to the deferential middling orders — might have added their mite to someone’s survival.
This is simply to rehearse that food supply (and indeed demography) have their own kind of politics, in which riot may be seen as a rational and effective agent. If there had been no food riots then this whole elaborate patchwork of protection might never have come into being. If we say, with Roger Wells, that “staving off starvation in the most vulnerable locations necessitated the speediest suppression of riot”, then we are taking a short-term view of the need, in emergency, to force the traffic in grain through a popular blockade. Over the longer-term view of two centuries and more, riot and the threat of riot may have staved off starvation, sometimes by actually forcing prices down, and more generally by forcing Government to attend to the plight of the poor, and by stimulating parish relief and local charity. The thesis then must be that the solidarities and collective actions of the urban working people, and in the manufacturing and mining districts, did something to bring the crisis of subsistence to an end. And conversely — but as a more tentative hypothesis — it might be that the comparative absence of riot in nineteenth-century Ireland and India was one factor (among others) which allowed dearth to pass into famine. And if this is the case, then the best thing that we, in our affluence, can do to help the hungry nations is to send them experts in the promotion of riot.1
Wendy Thwaites, who kindly read these pages in manuscript, has very sensibly rebuked me for even making this joke. She points out that the resources of modernised hungry nations have advanced since the eighteenth century, and (citing Nigel Twose, Cultivating Hunger (Oxfam, 1984)) describes a vehicle developed to deter rioters in the Dominican Republic or Haiti: “the AMAC-1 has nineteen weapon points, four multiple grenade launchers, a water cannon, an infra-red video camera for surveillance, and its bodywork can be electrified with a 7,000 volt charge”. She concludes that for riot to work there “have to be certain constraints on how far the authorities will go in repression”. I have left my jest in because it enables me also to include her thoughtful caution.
I say this only partly in jest, for what are at issue are the community defences and the political influence of the working people. At the very least, rulers are likely to be more busy with the relief of the poor if they fear that otherwise their rule may be endangered by riot. I don’t, of course, suppose that there was (and is) one alternative and universal set of remedies, “the moral economy”, for the successful overcoming of dearth and the prevention of famine. It is exactly against such universalist dogma (the “free market”) that I have been arguing. Perhaps all that can be expected in times of crisis is energetic improvisation, using whatever resources and options lie to hand. If political economy rests upon persuasive but misleading metaphors (such as “rationing”), the moral economy nourished its own irrationalisms and superstitions, such as the popular conviction that every dearth was the consequence of hoarding and speculation, “artificial scarcity”, or even some malevolent pacte de famine.
A case can always be made on both sides of the question. The exemplary punishment of profiteers1 or fraudulent dealers has sometimes had a beneficent effect upon prices, but the draconian imposition of price maximums has on occasion summoned forth a black market or a producers’ strike (the peasants withholding supply) with consequences no less baneful than those of doctrinaire laissez-faire. The mentality of urban revolutionaries has sometimes been profoundly hostile to the peasantry, and in the twentieth century collectivist states have precipitated famines as appalling as those presided over by complacent political economy. Some theorists today are interested in remembering the first, and in forgetting the second, which are tidied away as unmentionable in little exercises of political thought. For that reason I have redressed the account, to show that rioters had their reasons.
