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Susannah Ottaway, John Bohstedt. The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1550–1850. (The History of Retailing and Consumption.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2010. Pp. 312. $99.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 602–603, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.117.2.602
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John Bohstedt has been studying food riots in England for over three decades, and his accounts of this quintessential early modern phenomenon have appeared in an important monograph and dozens of articles, book chapters, and conference papers since the 1980s. The book under review is the culmination of that work, and it seeks to synthesize not only Bohstedt's many discrete studies but also the immense amount of historical research of the past half century that relates to this topic. One can pick holes in Bohstedt's arguments, but this does not detract from the sheer volume of work that he has done and the monumental task he has set himself in repositioning the discussion of food riots away from the conceptual framework of the “moral economy of the crowd” and toward a more empirically based “politics of provisions.”
Studies of early modern food riots proliferated after the publication of E. P. Thompson's “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (Past and Present 50 [1971]: 76–136). In an article that kindled the historical imagination of a generation of social historians and helped reset the terms of debate for eighteenth‐century social relations, Thompson argued that English crowds rioted not from some gut reaction to hunger but rather in defense of and through the mechanisms of a shared “moral economy,” which was pitted against the rising mentality of political economy. While Thompson's analysis fundamentally shaped the field, it rested less on empirical research than on an empathetic leap into the mentalité of eighteenth‐century communities. Bohstedt's work takes full advantage of numerous and sophisticated studies by historians such as John Walter and Nicholas Rogers to build his conceptual framework on firmer empirical ground. He argues that, while Thompson correctly identified the “intense moral dimensions” (p. 169) of crowd action, his article misrepresented the chronology of the phenomenon, failed to capture adequately the political dimensions of food rioting, and underplayed the importance of the market transition as a cause of food riots.
