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

Gauthier Lanot and Keith Tribe ()
Additional contact information
Keith Tribe: University of Jyväskylä, https://www.jyu.fi/

No 1025, Umeå Economic Studies from Umeå University, Department of Economics

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”.

Keywords: Corn Laws; grain prices; London Gazette; Annals of Agriculture; political economy; dearth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B11 B12 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2024-05-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-his and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.usbe.umu.se/ues/ues1025.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:umnees:1025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Umeå Economic Studies from Umeå University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by David Skog ().