Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 302

The politics of hunger is a timely and welcome contribution to ongoing debates surrounding food security, protest, and governmental policy in Britain. With use of food banks becoming endemic, the languages of ‘hunger’, ‘poverty’ and ‘starvation’ stubbornly remain central to modern politics. As Carl Griffin acknowledges, studying the ‘politics of hunger’ matters because ‘it is the history of now’ (p. 235). Unfortunately, there has been a tendency amongst historians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to focus on the emotive extremes of famine or narrow causal relationships. In this monograph, Griffin seeks to move beyond questions regarding living standards or logistics and explore how articulations of hunger were used as a tool of protest, a spur for public policy change, and a foundation for elite perceptions of the poor (p. 4). Concomitantly, this book demonstrates how the ‘bodily state of hunger’, and associated fear of starvation, were ever present in the lives of rural people. The ‘politics of hunger’ were not ‘rediscovered’ during the 1790s or the ‘Hungry Forties’ but were consistently voiced throughout the period.

An opening pair of chapters explore how the ‘politics of hunger’ empowered, legitimized, and encouraged popular protest. Chapter 1 studies how the idea of ‘hunger’ was mobilized during eighteenth-century subsistence crises. In this period, Griffin argues, the ‘twin discourses’ of hunger and starvation became a ‘critical plank of the moral economy’s invocation by poor consumers.’ Critically, whilst the ‘discourse of hunger’ spoke deferentially of need, the ‘discourse of starvation’ invoked ‘chaos and misrule’ (p. 31). Although claims to starvation were rarely meant literally, deploying the ‘discourse of starvation’ signalled a popular belief that dearth was imminent unless immediate action was taken. Subsequently, whilst crowds and middle-class sympathizers used ‘hunger’ to implore paternalistic masters for aid, ‘starvation’ was used to justify all forms of direct action and covert destruction. For Griffin, it was the ‘discourse of starvation’ that ultimately became integral to popular provisions politics and radical participatory politics. Conversely, the ‘discourse of hunger’ was ‘co-opted by authorities to stoke loyalist feeling’ (p. 48). As such, chapter 2 studies how the ‘discourse of starvation’ was repeatedly invoked in early nineteenth-century protest. Griffin rejects the claim that the supposed ‘death’ of food rioting in 1801 represented the end of hunger as a political force. Instead, the notion of ‘hunger amidst plenty’ would ‘become central to radical political discourse’ (p. 59). From William Cobbett to Swing, the anti-Poor Law movement, and Chartism, hunger ‘acted as a bridge between the city and the country, between the labourer and the operative’ (p. 73). By 1840, the discourse of starvation had thus become a universal and effective tool for urban and rural protestors.

The second brace of chapters reveals how local and national political authorities responded to the ‘discourse of starvation’, first through Speenhamland-style ‘bread scales’ and then the New Poor Law. For the former, Griffin contends that the introduction of ‘income-support schemes’ was a ‘humanitarian response’ to the ‘hypercrisis’ of 1795 whilst simultaneously being a ‘pragmatic yet paranoid attempt at maintaining order’ (p. 86). Importantly, Griffin traces how a variety of ‘Speenhamland-style scales’ dispersed throughout the nation, often exploitative and rarely advancing from semi-formalized systems of temporary relief. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of these scales signalled a change in how authorities perceived hunger. Rather than thinking of ‘individual need’, magistrates and parish officers now judged claimants through ‘universal measures of need’. With hunger being ‘measured and quantified’, poor workers were dehumanized as ‘objects of calculation and control’ (p. 103). These new imperatives to define and measure, Griffin argues, informed the New Poor Law. Chapter 4 thus explores the making and implementation of workhouse dietaries during the early years of the Poor Law Commission. Crucially, Griffin uncovers how dietary calculations struck an uneasy balance between ‘basic biological adequacy’ and a desire to punish ‘idleness and immorality’ (p. 140). Furthermore, when the PLC found itself unable to provide a diet that was both ‘humane and economic’ it deferred responsibility to local unions, enabling dietary regimes that were rarely adequate. Demonstrating his theoretical skill, Griffin details how workhouses were predicated on Foucauldian ‘biopolitics’, their systems designed to discipline and shape the pauper body (p. 155).

The politics of hunger concludes with two chapters that assess how hunger, and the hungry, were perceived and theorized between 1740 and 1850. In perhaps his most compelling contribution, Griffin utilizes theories from colonial and post-colonial histories to analyse how agricultural workers in Southern England were rendered as an ‘internal colonial subject’ (p. 183). By conceiving of the poor as a separate ‘animalistic’ race, authorities granted themselves moral consent to control and experiment upon the bodies of relief claimants, negating individual agency and transforming the hungry poor into ‘biopolitical subjects’ (p. 199). Although Griffin is careful not to simplistically equate impoverished labourers with enslaved peoples, his work skilfully demonstrates how racial theories were used to make sense of subaltern groups both abroad and at home. Consequently, Griffin’s final chapter examines how hunger could also be understood and mediated through the plight of ‘distant others’. By studying popular responses to the Irish Famine, it reveals how hunger was increasingly expressed as relational, becoming mediated not just by individual experience but also ‘through the experiences of real and imagined communities’ (p. 208). Despite lingering xenophobia in England’s working-class population, a shared understanding of hunger led to a number of charitable subscriptions motivated ‘by a sense of colonial responsibility and human solidarity’ (p. 225). In this crucial moment, Griffin argues, the modern humanitarian response to hunger and starvation began to emerge.

This is a pertinent, well-researched, and compassionate book that should become required reading for students of hunger, protest, politics, and public policy in modern Britain. In every chapter, Griffin combines studious archival research with acute theoretical insights to reveal how the discourses of hunger and starvation became engrained into the fabric of everyday life, governance and resistance. Although further work is needed to explore the ‘micropolitics’ of hunger in individual communities and regions, The politics of hunger will stand as a foundational text for a promising vein of future research.