The Moral Economy ReviewedThe Moral Economy Reviewed
I
The foregoing chapter was first published as an article in Past and Present in 1971. I have republished it without revision. I see no reason to retreat from its findings. And it has now entered into the stream of subsequent historical scholarship — it has been criticised and extensions of its theses have been proposed. It would confuse the record if I were to alter a text upon which commentary depends.
But some comment on my commentators is required. And also upon significant work which approaches the same problems, with little or no reference to my own. This is not a simple matter. For the “market” turns out to be a junction-point between social, economic and intellectual histories, and a sensitive metaphor for many kinds of exchange. The “moral economy” leads us not into a single argument but into a concourse of arguments, and it will not be possible to do justice to every voice.
A word first about my essay. Although first published in 1971 I commenced work on it in 1963 while awaiting proofs of The Making of the English Working Class. The project started then, for a joint study of British and French grain riots in the 1790s, in collaboration with Richard Cobb whose fine Terreur et Subsistances, 1793-1795 came out in 1964. He was then in Leeds and I was in Halifax and Gwyn A. Williams (then in Aberystwyth) was also enlisted as a collaborator in the project. I don’t remember how or when the project fell through, except that each member of the triumvirate moved in a different direction, Richard Cobb to Oxford, Gwyn Williams to York and myself to the University of Warwick. By 1970, when Cobb published his The Police and the People, our plan had certainly been dropped. There need be no regret for the failure of my part in that project to come to a conclusion, since Roger Wells has now explored every aspect of food and its mediations in England in the 1790s in copious detail in his Wretched Faces (1988).
But this explanation serves to place my essay, which was an enterprise not marginal but central to my research interests for nearly ten years. My files bulge with material collected on mills and marketing and meal mobs, etc., but since much of this repeats the evidence adduced in my article, it need not now be deployed. But a lot of work underlay my findings, and I may be forgiven if I am impatient with trivial objections.
II
It may be necessary to restate what my essay was about. It was not about all kinds of crowd, and a reader would have to be unusually thick-headed who supposed so.11 It was about the crowd’s “moral economy” in a context which the article defines. Nor was it about English and Welsh food riots in the eighteenth century — their where, why and when? — although it was certainly concerned with these. My object of analysis was the mentalité, or, as I would prefer, the political culture, the expectations, traditions, and, indeed, superstitions of the working population most frequently involved in actions in the market; and the relations — sometimes negotiations — between crowd and rulers which go under the unsatisfactory term of “riot”. My method was to reconstruct a paternalist model of food marketing, with protective institutional expression and with emergency routines in time of dearth, which derived in part from earlier Edwardian and Tudor policies of provision and market-regulation; to contrast this with the new political economy of the free market in grain, associated above all with The Wealth of Nations; and to show how, in times of high prices and of hardship, the crowd might enforce, with a robust direct action, protective market-control and the regulation of prices, sometimes claiming a legitimacy derived from the paternalist model.
To understand the actions of any particular crowd may require attention to particular market-places and particular practices in dealing. But to understand the “political” space in which the crowd might act and might negotiate with the authorities must attend upon a larger analysis of the relations between the two. The findings in “The Moral Economy” cannot be taken straight across to any “peasant market” nor to all proto-industrial market-places nor to Revolutionary France in the Years II and II nor to nineteenth-century Madras. Some of the encounters between growers, dealers and consumers were markedly similar, but I have described them as they were worked out within the given field-of-force of eighteenth-century English relations.
My essay did not offer a comprehensive overview of food riots in England in that century; it did not (for example) correlate the incidence of riots with price movements, nor explain why riot was more common in some regions than in others, nor attempt to chart a dozen other variables. Abundant new evidence on such questions has been brought forward in recent years, and much of it has been helpfully brought under examination in Andrew Charlesworth’s An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 1548-1900 (1983). Dr John Stevenson complains that “The Moral Economy” tells us “virtually nothing about why some places were almost perennially subject to disturbances, whilst others remained almost completely undisturbed”,11 but this was not the essay’s theme. Nor is there any sense in which the findings of scholars (such as Dr Stevenson) who have been addressing such themes must necessarily contradict or compete with my own. Economic and social historians are not engaged in rival party-political performances, although one might sometimes suppose so. The study of wages and prices and the study of norms and expectations can complement each other.
There are still a few ineducable positivists lingering about who do not so much disagree with the findings of social historians as they wish to disallow their questions. They propose that only one set of directly economic explanations of food riots — questions relating to the grain trade, harvests, market prices, etc., is needed or is even proper to be asked. An odd example is a short essay published by Dale Williams in 1976 entitled “Were ‘Hunger’ Rioters Really Hungry?”.11 In this he described my “moral economy” as intended as “a replacement” for an economic or quantitative approach. He had somehow got it into his head that riots must either be about hunger or about “social issues involving local usages and traditional rights”. But it will be recalled that I warn against precisely this confusion at the outset of my essay, using the analogy of a sexual tension chart: “the objection is that such a chart, if used unwisely, may conclude investigation at the exact point at which it becomes of serious sociological or cultural interest: being hungry (or being sexy), what do people do?” (p. 187). Of course food rioters were hungry — and on occasion coming close to starvation. But this does not tell us how their behaviour is “modified by custom, culture and reason”.
Nevertheless, this illustrates one point which we take far too easily for granted. Comparative study of food riots has been, inevitably, into the history of nations which had riots. There has been less comparative reflection upon national histories which afford evidence — and sometimes evidence sadly plentiful — of dearth passing into famine without passing through any phase in which riots of the West-European kind have been noted. Famines have been suffered in the past (as in Ireland and in India) and are suffered today in several parts of Africa, as our television screens reveal, with a fatalism sometimes mistaken for apathy or resignation. It is not only that beyond a certain point the undernourished have no physical or emotional resources for riot. (For this reason riot must take place before people are so weakened, and it may presuppose a watchful estimate of future supply and of market prices.) It is also that riot is a group, community, or class response to crisis; it is not within the power of a few individuals to riot. Nor need it be the only or the most obvious form of collective action — there may be alternatives such as the mass-petitioning of the authorities, fast days, sacrifices and prayer; perambulation of the houses of the rich; or the migration of whole villages.
Riot need not be favoured within the culture of the poor. It might provoke the gods (who had already sent dearth as a “Judgement”), and it could certainly alienate the governors or the rich from whom alone some small relief might come. An oncoming harvest failure would be watched with fear and awe. “Hunger employs its own outriders. Those who have already experienced it can see it announced, not only in the sky, but in the fields, scrutinized each year with increasing anxiety, week by week during the hot summer months. . .”11 In the eighteenth century Britain was only emerging from the “demographic ancien régime”, with its periodical visitations of famine and of plague, and dearth revived age-old memories and fears. Famine could place the whole social order on the rack, and the rulers were tested by their response to it. Indeed, by visible and well-advertised exertions the rulers might actually strengthen their authority during dearth, as John Walter and Keith Wrightson have argued from seventeenth-century examples. Central government, by issuing proclamations, invoking the successive regulations which became known as the Book of Orders, and proclaiming national days of fast, and the local authorities by a flurry of highly-visible activity against petty offenders ranging from badgers, forestallers and regrators to drunkards, swearers, sabbath-breakers, gamblers and rogues, might actually gain credibility among that part of the population persuaded that dearth was a judgement of God.11 At the least, the authorities made a public display of their concern. At the best, they might restrain rising prices or persuade farmers to release stocks to the open market.
Riot may even be a signal that the ancien régime is ending, since there is food in barns or granaries or barges to be seized or to be got to market, and some bargaining to be done about its price. True famine (where there really is no stock of food) is not often attended with riot, since there are few rational targets for the rioters. In the pastoral North-West of England as late as the 1590s and 1620s the population appears to have suffered from famine mortality. But “the poor. . . starved to death quietly, & created no problems of order for their governors”.22 In the Irish famine of 1845-7 there were a few anti-export riots in the early stages,33 but the Irish people could be congratulated in the Queen’s speech in 1847 for having suffered with “patience and resignation”. Riot is usually a rational response, and it takes place, not among helpless or hopeless people, but among those groups who sense that they have a little power to help themselves, as prices soar, employment fails, and they can see their staple food supply being exported from the district.
The passivity of the victims of famine is noted also in Asia. Under the ancien régime of famine in the East (as in the terrible Orissa famine of 1770) districts were depopulated by deaths and fugitives. The ryots fled the land to which they were tied. “Day and night a torrent of famished and disease-stricken wretches poured into the great cities.” Those who stayed on the land
Sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of the trees and the grass of the field. . .
But they did not (in the sense that we have been using) riot. Nor did they riot in the Bengal famine of 1866, when “many a rural household starved slowly to death without uttering a complaint or making a sign”, just as there are tales of the West of Ireland in 1847 where whole families walled themselves up in their cabins to die.11
In the Bengal famine of 1873-4, the people turned to government as the only possible provider. Over 400,000 settled down along the lines of relief roads, pleading for relief and work: “they dreaded quitting the road, which they imagined to be the only place where subsistence could be obtained”. At one place the line of carts bringing in the famine-struck from the villages stretched for twenty miles. At first there was screaming from the women and children, and begging for coin or grain. Later, the people were “seated on the ground, row after row, thousand upon thousand, in silence. . .”.22
There is not one simple, “animal”, response to hunger. Even in Bengal the evidence is contradictory and difficult to interpret. There is some evidence of the male heads of household abandoning their families (below p. 347), and other accounts of intense familial solidarities and of self-abnegation. A relief worker in rural Bengal in 1915 gives us a common story:
At noon I sat down at the foot of a tree to eat my bit of lunch. . . The people spotted me and long before I had finished there was a crowd of starving people around me. I did not finish it. I had a loaf of bread with me and. . . I gave the rest to the children. One little chap took his share and immediately broke it up into four pieces for his mother, two sisters and himself, leaving by far the smallest portion for himself.11
This is a learned response to hunger, which even the small children know. Begging, in which the children again are assigned their roles, is another learned response, or strategy. So also may be threats to the wealthy, or the theft of foodstuffs.22
“Riot” — itself a clumsy term which may conceal more than it reveals — is not a “natural” or “obvious” response to hunger but a sophisticated pattern of collective behaviour, a collective alternative to individualistic and familial strategies of survival. Of course hunger rioters were hungry, but hunger does not dictate that they must riot nor does it determine riot’s forms.
In 1984 Dale E. Williams launched a direct assault on “The Moral Economy” in an article in Past and Present under the title “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766”.33 The article draws a little upon his own substantial doctoral thesis on “English Hunger Riots in 1766” presented in 1978. But its intent is mainly polemical, and it is tedious to find that, after nearly two decades, one is invited to return to square one and to argue everything through again.
Andrew Charlesworth and Adrian Randall have been kind enough to correct the record and to point out Williams’s self-contradictions.11 To their critique I will only add that several of his sallies appear to be directed against his own findings in his doctoral thesis. So far from refuting my account of norms and behaviour, the crowds in Williams’s thesis conform to the account in “The Moral Economy”. Given high prices and the advance signals of dearth, the West of England clothing workers inhibited further exports of grain from the district, regulated markets with unusual discipline, forcibly persuaded farmers to send supplies to market, made certain of the authorities — including Mr Dalloway, the High Sheriff of Gloucestershire — for a time the “prisoners” of their demands, stimulated local measures of charity and relief, and (if I read Dr Williams aright) may have prevented dearth from passing into famine. And if Dale Williams wants examples of the crowd being informed by concern for “local usages and traditional rights” he need only turn to Dale Williams’s thesis where he will find sufficient examples, such as the crowd punishing millers by destroying their bolting machinery, as well as an Appendix of anonymous letters full of threats against broggers, forestallers, regrators, corn hoarders, sample sales, and the rest.22
Dr Williams has brought no issues of principle into debate, he is simply confused as to the questions which he is asking. There may also be a little ideological pressure behind his polemic. When I first published “The Moral Economy”, “the market” was not flying as high in the ideological firmament as it is today. In the 1970s something called “modernisation theory” swept through some undefended minds in Western academies, and subsequently the celebration of “the market economy” has become triumphal and almost universal. This renewed confidence in “the market” can be found in Dr Williams’s article, where I am rebuked for failing to pay “sufficient attention to the systems which produce wealth”. “The riot groups of 1766 were. . . all participants in a capitalist market system which, by the 1760s, was developed to a pitch of refinement unmatched elsewhere in the world.” “The Moral Economy” has become suspect because it explored with sympathy alternative economic imperatives to those of the capitalist market “system”. . . and offered one or two sceptical comments as to the infallibility of Adam Smith.
Similar questions worried more courteous critics shortly after “The Moral Economy” was published: Professors A. W. Coats and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. I did not reply to either comment, since the arrows flew past my ear. Professor Coats11 devoted his comment to rehearsing Smithian doctrine on the internal trade in grain, in terms of its logical consistency (but without recourse to empirical confirmation), and he repeated uncritically the statement that “high prices resulted mainly from physical shortages”, as if this explanation of price movements suffices for all cases. But, as we shall see (pp. 283-7), it does not. Then Coats debated my notion as to the “de-moralizing of the theory of trade and consumption” implicit in the model of the new political economy. What I say (above, pp. 201-2) is this:
By ‘de-moralising’ it is not suggested that Smith and his colleagues were immoral or were unconcerned for the public good. It is meant, rather, that the new political economy was disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives. The old pamphleteers were moralists first and economists second. In the new economic theory questions as to the moral polity of marketing do not enter, unless as preamble and peroration.
Coats takes this to imply an acceptance on my part of the credentials of “positive” economics, as a science purged of norms, and he reminds me of the “moral background and implications of Smith’s economic analysis”. But I had not forgotten that Smith was also author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). I had supposed that Coats’s point had been met in a footnote (above p. 202) in which I had allowed Smith’s intention to serve the public good but had added that “intention is a bad measure of ideological interest and of historical consequences”. It is perfectly possible that laissez-faire doctrines as to the food trade could have been both normative in intent (i.e. Adam Smith believed they would encourage cheap and abundant food) and ideological in outcome (i.e. in the result their supposedly de-moralised scientism was used to mask and to apologise for other self-interested operations).
I would have thought that my views were commonplace. The Tudor policies of “provision” cannot be seen, in a modern sense, as an “economic” strategy only: they depended also on theories of the State, of the reciprocal obligations and duties of governors and governed in times of dearth, and of paternalist social control; they still, in the early seventeenth century, had strong religious or magical components. In the period 1700-1760, with the dominance of mercantilist theory, we are in a kind of middle passage of theory. The magical components of the Tudor theory became much weaker. And the social location of the theory became more ambiguous; while some traditionalist gentry and magistrates invoked it in times of dearth, the authority of the theory was fast eroding as any acceptable account of normal marketing practice. The paternal obligations of “provision” were at odds with the mercantilist imperative to maximise the export of grain. At the same time there was a certain migration of the theory from the rulers to the crowd.
Nevertheless, the form of much economic argument remained (on all sides) moralistic: it validated itself at most points with reference to moral imperatives (what obligations the state, or the landowners, or the dealers ought to obey). Such imperatives permeated economic thinking very generally, and this is familiar to any student of economic thought. One historian has written that
Economic theory owes its present development to the fact that some men, in thinking of economic phenomena, forcefully suspended all judgments of theology, morality, and justice, were willing to consider the economy as nothing more than an intricate mechanism, refraining for the while from asking whether the mechanism worked for good or evil.11
Joyce Appleby has shown the moral economy “in retreat” in the mid-seventeenth century, but the tension between norms and “mechanism” once again became marked in the eighteenth. A locus classicus is the scandal provoked by Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, which, by its equation private vices = public benefits, sought exactly to divorce moral imperatives on the one hand and economic process on the other. This was felt by some to be an outrage to official morality; by demystifying economic process it would strip authority of its paternal legitimacy; and the book was presented, in 1723, by the Grand Jury of Middlesex as a public nuisance.
Thus the notion of “economics” as a non-normative object of study, with objective mechanism independent of moral imperatives, was separating itself off from traditionalist theory during the mercantilist period, and with great difficulty: in some areas it did this with less difficulty (national book-keeping, arguments about trade and bullion), but in areas which related to internal distribution of the prime necessities of life the difficulties were immense. For if the rulers were to deny their own duties and functions in protecting the poor in time of dearth, then they might devalue the legitimacy of their rule. So tenaciously and strongly was this view held that as late as 1800 the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Kenyon, pronounced that the fact that forestalling remained an offence at Common Law “is a thing most essential to the existence of the country”. “When the people knew there was a law to resort to, it composed their minds” and removed the threat of “insurrection”.11 This is an argument, not from economics and not even from law, but from the highest reasons of State.
The “morality” of Adam Smith was never the matter at issue, but — in relation to the internal trade in grain — the terms and the vocabulary, indeed the problematic of that argument. “The market economy created new moral problems”, Professor Atiyah has written, and “it may not have been so obvious then, as it became later, that this was not so much to separate morality and economics, as to adopt a particular type of morality in the interests of a particular type of economy”.11 Perhaps I might have made it more clear that “preamble and peroration” had real significance in the intentions of the classical political economists: these were something more than rhetorical devices. Professor Coats’s reminder that Smithian economics “were securely grounded in the liberal-moral philosophy of the eighteenth-century enlightenment” has in recent years become a centre for intense academic interest and we will return to it.
Maybe the trouble lies with the word “moral”. “Moral” is a signal which brings on a rush of polemical blood to the academic head. Nothing has made my critics angrier than the notion that a food rioter might have been more “moral” than a disciple of Dr Adam Smith. But that was not my meaning (whatever the judgement might have been in the eye of God). I was discriminating between two different sets of assumptions, two differing discourses, and the evidence for the difference is abundant. I wrote of “a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor” (above p. 188). To this were added a dense tissue of precedents and of practices in the sequence of food marketing. I could perhaps have called this “a sociological economy”, and an economy in its original meaning (oeconomy) as the due organisation of a household, in which each part is related to the whole and each member acknowledges her/his several duties and obligations. That, indeed, is as much, or more, “political” than is “political economy”, but by usage the classical economists have carried off the term.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s arrow flies past my ear for much the same reason.22 She finds that both traditional and classical economics can be said to be “moral” (at least in their own self-image) and also that both were “part of larger ruling class ideologies”. There is not much here that conflicts with, or even engages with, my arguments, and perhaps Fox-Genovese’s real difference of emphasis lies in her feeling that I “lean towards a romantic view of the traditionalists”. My tendency “to favour the paternalists” leads me to overlook that “if the rise of a market society brought indisputable horrors, it also brought an emphasis on individual freedom of choice, the right to self-betterment, eventually the opportunity to political participation”.
That is also what we are assured — or used to be assured — by the modernisation theorists. And of course the rioters were already deeply involved, in some part of their lives, in a market economy’s exchanges of labour, services, and of goods. (I will refrain from mentioning those critics who have put up the fat-headed notion that there has been proposed an absolute segregation between a moral and a market economy, to save their blushes.11) But before we go on to consider all these undoubted human goods we should delay with the market as dispenser of subsistence in time of dearth, which alone is relevant to my theme. For despite all the discourse that goes on about “the market” or “market relations”, historiographical interest in the actual marketing of grain, flour or bread is little more evident today than it was in 1971.22
Is market a market or is market a metaphor? Of course it can be both, but too often discourse about “the market” conveys the sense of something definite — a space or institution of exchange (perhaps London’s Corn Exchange at Mark Lane?) — when in fact, sometimes unknown to the term’s user, it is being employed as a metaphor of economic process, or an idealisation or abstraction from that process. Perhaps to acknowledge this second usage, Burke sometimes employed the word without the definite article:
Market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer, when they mutually discover each other’s wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the civility, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled. . . The moment that government appears at market, all the principles of market will be subverted.11
That is loop-language: it is wholly self-fulfilling. And much the same feedback loop-language is being used today in the higher theorising of market relations. Political economy has its sophisticated intellectual genealogies, and the history of political economy is a vigorous academic discourse with its own journals and its controversies and conferences, in which changes are rung on approved themes: Pufendorf, Virtue, natural law, Pocock, Grotius, the Physiocrats, Pocock, Adam Smith. These chimes have fascination, and for the bell-ringers it is an admirable mental exercise, but the peal can become so compelling that it drowns out other sounds. Intellectual history, like economic history before it, becomes imperialist and seeks to over-run all social life. It is necessary to pause, from time to time, to recall that how people thought their times need not have been the same as how those times eventuated. And how some people thought “market” does not prove that market took place in that way. Because Adam Smith offered “a clear analytical demonstration of how markets in subsistence goods and labour could balance themselves out in a manner consistent with strict justice and the natural law of humanity”11 this does not show that any empirically observable market worked out in that way. Nor does it tell us how strict justice to the rights of property could balance with natural humanity to labouring people.
Messrs Hont and Ignatieff, in the course of a prestigious research project into “Political Economy and Society, 1750-1850” at King’s College, Cambridge, have fallen across my “Moral Economy” article and they rebuke it for failing to conform to the parameters of Cambridge political thought:
By recovering the moral economy of the poor and the regulatory system to which they made appeal, Thompson has set the iconoclasm of the Smithian position in sharp relief, crediting him with the first theory to revoke the traditional social responsibility attached to property. Yet the antinomy — moral economy versus political economy — caricatures both positions. The one becomes a vestigial, traditional moralism, the other a science ‘disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives’. To the extent that favouring an adequate subsistence for the poor can be called a moral imperative, it was one shared by paternalists and political economists alike. . . On the other hand, to call the moral economy traditionalist is to portray it simply as a set of vestigial moral preferences innocent of substantive argument about the working of markets. In fact, so-called traditionalists were quite capable of arguing their position on the same terrain as their political economist opponents. Indeed, and this is the crucial point, debate over market or ‘police’ strategies for providing subsistence for the poor divided philosophers and political economists among themselves no less deeply than it divided the crowd for Smith. Indeed, it makes no sense to take Smith as typical of the range of opinion within the European Enlightenment camp. This becomes apparent if one moves beyond the English context, to which Thompson confines his discussion, and considers the debate in its full European setting. The crucial context for Smith’s ‘Digression on Grain’ was not the encounter with the English or Scottish crowd, but the French debates over the liberalization of the internal trade in 1764-6, which occurred. . . when Smith himself was in France.22
There are some wilful confusions here. The first point to make about this passage is that, just as much as with the ineducable positivists, it is not so much offering to debate my views as to disallow my questions. Hont and Ignatieff prefer to operate in a detached discipline of political ideas and rhetoric. They do not wish to know how ideas presented themselves as actors in the market-place, between producers, middlemen and consumers, and they imply that this is an improper light in which to view them. It may be “the crucial point” for Hont and Ignatieff that debate over market strategies divided philosophers among themselves no less deeply than it divided the crowd from Smith, but my essay is about the crowd and not about philosophers. Hont and Ignatieff are rebuking me for writing an essay in social history and in popular culture instead of in approved Cambridge themes. I ought to have grabbed a bell-rope and pealed out Quesnay along with Pufendorf, Pocock, Grotius, Hume and the rest.
Even so, Hont and Ignatieff’s censures are sloppier than the case calls for. So far from “crediting” Adam Smith “with the first theory to revoke the traditional social responsibility attached to property” (their words, not mine) I am at pains to note the opposite, describing the Wealth of Nations “not only as a point of departure but also as a grand central terminus to which many important lines of discussion in the middle of the eighteenth century. . . all run”. (Above p. 201.) It is in fact Hont and Ignatieff, and not Thompson, who write that “by 1776, Smith remained the only standard-bearer for ‘natural liberty’ in grain”,11 a spectacular misstatement which they reach by confusing the British context with the French context in the aftermath of the guerre des farines. As for portraying the “moral economy” as “a set of vestigial moral preferences innocent of substantive argument about the working of markets”, the trouble is, once again, the vulgarity of the crowd. They were not philosophers. They did, as my essay shows, have substantive and knowledgeable arguments about the working of markets, but about actual markets rather than theorised market relations. I am not persuaded that Hont and Ignatieff have read very far in the pamphlets and newspapers — let alone in the crowd relations — where these arguments will be found and I do not know what business they have to put me, or the crowd, down.
I did not, of course, take Smith as “typical of the range of opinion within the European Enlightenment camp”. I took Smith’s “Digression Concerning the Corn Trade” in Book Four, Chapter 5, of The Wealth of Nations as being the most lucid expression in English of the standpoint of the new political economy upon market relations in subsistence foodstuffs. As such it was profoundly influential within British governmental circles, and few chapters can have had a more palpable influence upon policies or have been used more extensively to justify policies which were already being enacted. Pitt and Grenville read it together in the 1780s and became wholly converted; when Pitt wavered in the crisis year 1800 Grenville called him back to their old faith.11 Burke was an ardent adherent and had reached similar positions independently; he had been, in 1772, a prime mover in the repeal of the ancient forestalling legislation, and he was to moralise the “laws” of political economy and nominate them to be divine.22 In the nineteenth century class after class of administrators were sent out to India, fully indoctrinated at Haileybury College in Smith’s “Digression”, and ready to respond to the vast exigencies of Indian famine by resolutely resisting any improper interventions in the free operation of the market. T. R. Malthus, appointed Professor of Political Economy at Haileybury in 1805, was an early and apt instructor.
Hont and Ignatieff know that “the crucial context” for Smith’s digression “was not the encounter with the English or Scottish crowd, but the French debates over the liberalization of the internal trade in 1764-6”. I wonder how they know? A French philosophic influence is more reputable than an English or Scottish crowd, and of course Adam Smith was profoundly influenced by physiocratic thought. The influence of “the French debates” may be guessed at, but is not evident in the few pages of Smith’s digression. The debate about the liberalisation of trade had proceeded in England and Scotland also, and had become more heated at the time of the dearth of 1756-7, when many English local authorities had symbolically enforced some of the old protective legislation.11 As it happens the only authority cited by Smith in his digression is not a French physiocrat but Charles Smith, whose Three Tracts on the Corn Trade date from 1758 (above p. 201). Adam Smith is likely to have been influenced in his market theories by Scottish experience as well as French, but the digression is argued almost wholly in terms of English practices and laws.22
Plate III. This woolcombers’ union card of 1838 still has the figure of Bishop Blaize at top centre.
Plate XVI. Prices rally do fall in the autumn of 1801.
Plate XVIII. Time, work and mortality are invoked at the Neptune Yard, Walker, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Plate XXII. Hogarth’s illustration form “Hudibras” of a Skimmington.
