Food Riots and the Politics of Provisions in Early-Modern England and France, the Irish Famine and World War I

Abstract

The politics of provisions gained surprising power from the common people’s need for bread and their states’ need for their orderly allegiance. Many societies acknowledged a droit de subsistance, a law of necessity that in emergencies gave human survival priority over individual property rights, an entitlement that paternalism viewed as charity and consumers, as a right.1 But need alone did not generate effective protest; hungry people have often suffered and died unnoticed. As much or more than needs and norms, the politics of provisions was shaped by particular political cultures, economies, histories of conflict, social networks, policy decisions and wars. Sometimes that matrix of factors empowered food rioters to win relief; but sometimes hunger had no voice, and then corpses lined Irish or Chinese roads.2 But when outrage inflamed hunger, given a ‘political opportunity’, people might risk a riot, declaring, ‘We’d rather be hanged than starved!’ If that risk was real, so were — sometimes — their rulers’ measures to relieve them.