Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 137

John Bohstedt’s excellent new book has been some twenty-five years in the making. Like his influential and controversial study of ‘community (food) politics’ in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England, the Politics of provisions also steers a radical course. Taking inspiration from E.P.Thompson’s seminal study of the ‘moral economy’ of the eighteenth-century English market, Bohstedt’s study attempts to first contextualise the ‘classic’ eighteenth-century food riot in terms of earlier antecedents, before taking aim at Thompson’s central thesis that food rioters were attacking an ‘innovative market economy’. Thompson’s rioters were, he argues, operating in a broader historical context of a ‘provisions politics’ that had started to cohere in the middle of the sixteenth century, a function of the sustained demographic boom and associated economic expansion. Thompson’s chronology, so Bohstedt suggests, is therefore wrong. There had been food riots before then, as Buchanan Sharp’s studies have shown, but rather post-1550 we see broadly the same social dynamics that underpinned eighteenth-century food riots in place. Indeed, this formative period with its ‘maturing market economy’ and waves of anti-export riots in 1586, 1597–8, 1614, 1629–31 and 1647–50 was followed by a discernible downturn in food rioting between c.1650 and 1740.

Why did this ‘recession of provisions politics’ occur? In an elegant and strikingly original chapter, he suggests post-Civil Wars political shifts and easing population pressures coupled with rising agricultural productivity and market integration allowed England to slip the ‘shadow famine’ that had plagued the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Notwithstanding that the number of market-dependent consumers grew, rising productivity even allowed government to offer bounties to encourage farmers to export. This is not to say that food riots did not occur, but rather that they were far less frequent. Moreover, rather than focusing on ‘ports’, as riots had done in the earlier period, the focus shifted to newly industrialising communities – Halifax, Rochdale and Sheffield engaged in food rioting for the first time in 1728 – and, especially in the crisis years of the 1690s, the emergent ‘bread baskets’ of East Anglia and Northamptonshire. Bohstedt also notes a change in the discourses and actions of food rioters in this period, shifting from an earlier focus on ‘prodding’ governments to support local relief to instead more violent, and direct, attacks on middlemen and merchants. Certain social and occupational groups also became key actors in riots, especially the Cornish tinners and the colliers of Kingswood.

As such, the ‘golden age’ of food riots that followed in the period between 1740 to the mid-1770s was underpinned in some locales by earlier experiences. However, and this is Bohstedt’s key point, many communities were drawn into provision politics for the first time in 1740, not by ‘moral offense’ but by sheer necessity. The thunder of paternalist moral economy discourses about market villains merely acted to ‘lubricate’ rioters’ actions rather than directly motivating them. So, as the country lunged from one food crisis to another with conditions exacerbated by continued bounty-driven exports, communities responded to a genuine need by targeting those marketers who were perceived to be responsible for shortages and other forms of market manipulation. In particular, bolting mills, the critical cogs in the export trade, were frequent targets. Bolting mills and other such targets were not recent innovations, rather they were symbols of profiteering and often suspected of engaging in adulteration. So, Bohstedt suggests, the ‘law of necessity’ drove poor consumers to act, and in these emergencies moral bonds and law did not hold. Indeed, to risk execution for rioting was to be seen to be in absolute need. What was novel about the eighteenth century, he suggests, was that further commercialisation created new industrial communities of market-dependent consumers who were ‘ripe for riot’. It was precisely these independent peoples who were to be found leading protests. In market towns that were also parliamentary boroughs, the culture of political bargaining facilitated repeated food riots. For instance in Norwich, Northampton and Nottingham, food riots often assumed remarkably similar forms and utilised the same language as election riots. Such local cultural precedents were, he argues, far more important than paternalist rhetoric, something espoused mainly by country gentlemen and so little exercised in the courts against forestallers and regraters that it ‘must have appeared hollow’ to poor consumers.

The highpoint of provisions politics came in 1800 when widespread and effectively disciplined food riots won ‘rapid relief concessions’. These riots, and to a lesser extent those in 1795, occurred on a national basis, though the organised and industrial communities that had developed traditions of rioting were both first to protest and most successful. Other ‘alien tribes’, such as navvies and bankers, were also quick to adopt the techniques of long-established community and occupational groups. Responses in 1795 and 1800 were nationally coordinated in relation to the brutal repression of militia-led riots, mirroring the violence of the 1766 Special Commissions, and locally-driven in relation to effecting ‘solutions’. Yet it was not this more effective balance between repression and concession achieved in the 1790s and 1800s that sealed the end of the politics of provisions so much as the fact that shops replaced markets as the most important form of provisions retailing. In short, Bohstedt asserts, targets became more diffuse, whilst consumer reliance on credit from shopkeepers meant that riot was no longer possible let alone appropriate. Moreover, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the combination of the formalisation of elite interventions in meeting subsistence needs and, post-1815, declining food prices, meant that the focus of the poor’s opprobrium shifted to remuneration and the conditions of their labour.

So, this is a landmark book. Much like Adrian Randall’s Riotous Assemblies (2006), it represents a high point for the school of protest studies immediately inspired by Thompson’s pioneering works. It is written with economy and precision, it wears its many historiographical readings lightly, and makes excellent use – in the latter chapters especially – of a rich archive. The first two substantive chapters are more reliant on secondary material rather than original archival readings, meaning that Bohstedt’s analysis necessarily lacks the certainty of the later chapters. Another, minor, consideration is the fact that Bohstedt’s riot survey is based on both his archival endeavours and that of others, leaving the possibility that not all locations have been subjected to the same systematic archival analysis of local sources to which Bohstedt has subjected Devon and Manchester. Readers of this journal might also question the accuracy of Bohstedt’s contention – which in itself is a reworking of a claim first made by Roger Wells – that the development of the poor law system with its emphasis upon the surveillance and good character of the poor meant that rural labourers were unlikely to protest. But that these are such slight criticisms merely serves to highlight that Bohstedt’s overall achievement is so impressive. This is an important, rigorous, and original book that deserves a wide readership.