Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758-1834 by Tilly Charles;

Author:Tilly, Charles;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4185957
Publisher: Routledge

The Issue Is Food

Even within the domain of struggle over the food supply we see some evidence of repertoire change. The years from 1789 to 1815, 1794–1795, and 1799–1801 (each counted up to the harvest of the later year) were times of famine in Great Britain; 1811–1812 brought bad times as well. Famine, as Amartya Sen has stated with great lucidity, consists of a killing decline in people’s entitlement to food (Sen 1981). Such a decline occurs through many different combinations of food shortage, price rise, and income loss. All three converged in the British crises: bad harvests, already elevated wartime prices shooting upward, both agricultural and industrial workers’ loss of wages because of the crisis—the first because of diminished employment in farming, the second because of diversion of demand away from cheap textiles to food. Wheat on the Exeter market rose by 32.3 percent from 1794 to 1795, by 64.6 percent from 1798 to 1799, and another 20.1 percent the following year (Deane and Cole 1971). Although at Exeter wheat prices of 1812 simply maintained their high levels of the three previous years, in Great Britain as a whole the 1811–1812 rise reached 33 percent (ibid.).

High prices, low incomes, and shortages alone do not generate struggles over food. It takes at least these elements: a mobilized and aggrieved population, visible offenders against shared conceptions of justice, and authorities who fail to intervene on the popular side. These mediating factors attenuate the correlation between frequency of contention and fluctuations of food prices. In his analysis of violent events involving fifty people or more in England and Wales from 1790 to 1810, John Bohstedt finds an annual correlation of +.41 between current price levels and frequency of “food riots”; he indicates a somewhat higher (but unspecified) correlation between that frequency and recent rises in prices (Bohstedt 1983).

In London’s hinterland the readiness of authorities to intervene surely muted the impact of prices on contention, especially in the later phases of economic crises. During the shortages of 1794–1796, 1799–1801, and 1811–1812, as in 1766, authorities took great care to ensure London’s food supply at the expense of other regions, with the consequence that forced sales of food and blockage of shipments concentrated in industrial regions elsewhere. In the Southeast per capita expenditures for poor relief probably reached their all-time high during 1801 (Baugh 1975). This time the newer industrial regions of the North loomed much larger than they had in the 1760s; the geographies of 1794–1796 and 1799–1801 strikingly resembled each other (Booth 1977; Charlesworth 1983; Wells 1988). Nevertheless, older industrial regions such as Devon continued to resound with struggles over food. Within those regions, likewise, as John Bohstedt argues for Devon, the geography of alimentary contention remained quite constant from 1795 to 1801 (Bohstedt 1983).

It was the forms of action that changed. Although old-fashioned price-fixing seizures of food continued, as compared with the great crisis of 1766, the famines of 1794–1795 and 1799–1801 generated a higher proportion of meetings and demonstration-like assemblies.

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