Steering the free market through a food crisis? Fiscal policy and meat consumption in Brussels during the 1840s

Abstract

ABSTRACT By the 1840s the Brussels city council had become distinctly liberal in its approach to the economy. Even the meat sector, once uniquely intensely regulated by urban authorities, had shed almost all early modern regulation and was largely left to the free market. However, the 1840s subsistence crisis and rising food prices increased pressure on lawmakers to intervene. This paper explores how, rather than returning to older consumer-protecting limits on the market such as price-setting, the council used its fiscal authority to ease its citizens’ burden. What appears from discussions on taxation is a great willingness to try to influence the free market through changing tax rates in favour of the interest of poor and labouring consumers. Unlike the shift from prices to health the literature suggests (Horowitz, Pilcher and Watts [2004]. “Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century.” The American Historical Review 109, no. 4 (October 2004): 1055–1083. doi:10.1086/530749), this consumer interest was interpreted as relating both to meat prices and meat quality and salubriousness. While the explicit focus on urban consumers was new, many arguments repeated early modern concerns of greedy butchers preying on poor consumers, with price and health as twin priorities. The new liberal regime, facing crisis, used new tools, but traditional discourse and conceptions of government responsibility persisted.