Abstract
The politics of provisions gained surprising power from the common people’s need for bread and their states’ need for their orderly allegiance. Many societies acknowledged a droit de subsistance, a law of necessity that in emergencies gave human survival priority over individual property rights, an entitlement that paternalism viewed as charity and consumers, as a right.1 But need alone did not generate effective protest; hungry people have often suffered and died unnoticed. As much or more than needs and norms, the politics of provisions was shaped by particular political cultures, economies, histories of conflict, social networks, policy decisions and wars. Sometimes that matrix of factors empowered food rioters to win relief; but sometimes hunger had no voice, and then corpses lined Irish or Chinese roads.2 But when outrage inflamed hunger, given a ‘political opportunity’, people might risk a riot, declaring, ‘We’d rather be hanged than starved!’ If that risk was real, so were — sometimes — their rulers’ measures to relieve them.
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Notes
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Riots of all sorts are examined in R.B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (New York, 1988).
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Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, pp. 79, 88; E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy Reviewed’, in his Customs in Common (London, 1991), p. 261.
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and Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c. 1550–1750 (Oxford, 2004).
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Kaplan, ‘Lean Years, Fat Years’, pp. 197–230. For the small granary established at Corbeil on the Seine in 1760, see S.L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague, 1976), chapters 8 and 15.
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Bohstedt, J. (2015). Food Riots and the Politics of Provisions in Early-Modern England and France, the Irish Famine and World War I. In: Davis, M.T. (eds) Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_7
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