[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/umnees/1025.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Before Political Economy: Debate over Grain Markets, Dearth and Pauperism in England, 1794-96

Author

Listed:
Abstract
During the 1790s Britain experienced a series of poor harvests which, given an expanding population and wartime disruption to the European grain trade, resulted in sudden and rapid increases in the domestic price of wheat. In modern discussion of Corn and Poor Laws the severity of these fluctuations has been obscured by the use of annual average grain prices, despite weekly county prices being available from 1771 as published in the London Gazette. We highlight the uncertainties of grain prices during the period 1794-96, drawing upon extensive contemporary discussion published in the Annals of Agriculture of the problems arising from rapid fluctuations in the price of wheat. Our purpose is to demonstrate that the tropes usually today associated with the Corn and Poor Laws – pauperism, a clash between merchant, manufacturing and landlord interests, population and impoverishment – are absent from discussion during this period. A doctrinaire “political economy” would develop in the early 1800s, but did not yet exist. Policy argument drew upon casuistic reasoning from circumstance and past experience. We also show that this approach undermines any idea that Edmund Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity is in some way connected to “political economy”.

Suggested Citation

  • Lanot, Gauthier & Tribe, Keith, 2024. "Before Political Economy: Debate over Grain Markets, Dearth and Pauperism in England, 1794-96," Umeå Economic Studies 1025, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:umnees:1025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.usbe.umu.se/ues/ues1025.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Blaug, Mark, 1963. "The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 23(2), pages 151-184, June.
    2. Susan Fairlie, 1969. "The Corn Laws and British Wheat Production, 1829-76," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 22(1), pages 88-110, April.
    3. Nielsen, Randall, 1997. "Storage and English Government Intervention in Early Modern Grain Markets," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 57(1), pages 1-33, March.
    4. Liam Brunt & Edmund Cannon, 2013. "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: the English Corn Returns as a data source in economic history, 1770-1914," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 17(3), pages 318-339, August.
    5. Shaw-Taylor, Leigh, 2001. "Parliamentary Enclosure And The Emergence Of An English Agricultural Proletariat," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 61(3), pages 640-662, September.
    6. Blaug, Mark, 1964. "The Poor Law Report Reexamined," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 24(2), pages 229-245, June.
    7. Colin Smith, 2002. "The wholesale and retail markets of London, 1660–1840[I am grate]," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 55(1), pages 31-50, February.
    8. Boyer,George R., 1990. "An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521364799, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Henry French, 2015. "An irrevocable shift: detailing the dynamics of rural poverty in southern England, 1762–1834: a case study," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 68(3), pages 769-805, August.
    2. Steven Pressman, 2014. "Keynes, Family allowances and Keynesian economic policy," LIS Working papers 616, LIS Cross-National Data Center in Luxembourg.
    3. Nina Boberg-Fazlić & Paul Sharp, 2018. "North and south: long-run social mobility in England and attitudes toward welfare," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 12(2), pages 251-276, May.
    4. Gregory Clark & Marianne E. Page, 2019. "Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?," Cliometrica, Springer;Cliometric Society (Association Francaise de Cliométrie), vol. 13(2), pages 221-244, May.
    5. William Baumol, 2012. "Mark Blaug (1927–2011)," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 36(2), pages 167-170, May.
    6. Liam Brunt & Edmund Cannon, 2022. "English farmers’ wheat storage and sales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 75(3), pages 932-959, August.
    7. Greif, Avner & Iyigun, Murat, 2013. "What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux," IZA Discussion Papers 7398, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    8. Martin Ravallion, 2020. "On the Origins of the Idea of Ending Poverty," NBER Working Papers 27808, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Joseph Persky, 1997. "Retrospectives: Classical Family Values: Ending the Poor Laws as They Knew Them," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 11(1), pages 179-189, Winter.
    10. Bahal, Girish & Shrivastava, Anand, 2021. "Supply variabilities in public workfares," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 150(C).
    11. Ogilvie, Sheilagh & Carus, A.W., 2014. "Institutions and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 8, pages 403-513, Elsevier.
    12. Aidt, T. S. & Leon, G. & Satchell, M., 2017. "The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Captain Swing Riots, 1830-31," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1751, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    13. Ian Gazeley & Sara Horrell, 2013. "Nutrition in the English agricultural labourer's household over the course of the long nineteenth century," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 66(3), pages 757-784, August.
    14. Ziliak, Stephen T., 1997. "Kicking the Malthusian vice: Lessons from the abolition of "welfare" in the late nineteenth century," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 449-468.
    15. Marianne Page & Gregory Clark, 2008. "Welfare Reform, 1834," Working Papers 150, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    16. Steven Pressman, 2014. "Keynes, family allowances, and Keynesian economic policy," Review of Keynesian Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, vol. 2(4), pages 508-526, October.
    17. Horrell, Sara & Humphries, Jane & Voth, Hans-Joachim, 2001. "Destined for Deprivation: Human Capital Formation and Intergenerational Poverty in Nineteenth-Century England," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 339-365, July.
    18. Bahal, G. & Shrivastava, A., 2016. "Labor Market Effects of Inconsistent Policy Interventions: Evidence from India’s Employment Guarantees," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1669, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    19. Thomas Nutt, 2010. "Illegitimacy, paternal financial responsibility, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission Report: the myth of the old poor law and the making of the new," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 63(2), pages 335-361, May.
    20. Masako Kimura & Daishin Yasui, 2012. "Public Policy and the Income-Fertility Relationship in Economic Development," Discussion Papers 1224, Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corn Laws; grain prices; London Gazette; Annals of Agriculture; political economy; dearth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B11 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Preclassical (Ancient, Medieval, Mercantilist, Physiocratic)
    • B12 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - Classical (includes Adam Smith)
    • P00 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - General - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:umnees:1025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: David Skog (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inumuse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.