Author: Charles MusartPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Grain trade
Languages : fr
Pages : 286
Book Description
The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700-1775
Author: Steven Laurence KaplanPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822381982
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 784
Book Description
In preindustrial Europe, dependence on grain shaped every phase of life from economic development to spiritual expression, and the problem of subsistence dominated the everyday order of things in a merciless and unremitting way. Steven Laurence Kaplan’s The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 focuses on the production and distribution of France’s most important commodity in the sprawling urban center of eighteenth-century Paris where provisioning needs were most acutely felt and most difficult to satisfy. Kaplan shows how the relentless demand for bread constructed the pattern of daily life in Paris as decisively and subtly as elaborate protocol governed the social life at Versailles. Despite the overpowering salience of bread in public and private life, Kaplan’s is the first inquiry into the ways bread exercised its vast and significant empire. Bread framed dreams as well as nightmares. It was the staff of life, the medium of communion, a topic of common discourse, and a mark of tradition as well as transcendence. In his exploration of bread’s materiality and cultural meaning, Kaplan looks at bread’s fashioning of identity and examines the conditions of supply and demand in the marketplace. He also sets forth a complete history of the bakers and their guild, and unmasks the methods used by the authorities in their efforts to regulate trade. Because the bakers and their bread were central to Parisian daily life, Kaplan’s study is also a comprehensive meditation on an entire society, its government, and its capacity to endure. Long-awaited by French history scholars, The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question, 1700–1775 is a landmark in eighteenth-century historiography, a book that deeply contextualizes, and thus enriches our understanding of one of the most important eras in European history.
Provisioning Paris
Author: Steven Laurence KaplanPublisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501731424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 668
Book Description
Dependence upon grain deeply marked every aspect of life in eighteenth-century France. Steven Kaplan focuses upon this dependence at the point where it placed the greatest strain on the state, the society, and the individual—on the daily supply of grain and flour that furnished the staff of life. He reconstructs the history of provisioning in pre-industrial Paris and provides a comprehensive view of a culture shaped by the subsistence imperative. Who were the agents of the provisioning trade? What were their commercial practices? What sorts of relations did they maintain with each other? How did the authorities regulate their business? To answer these questions, Professor Kaplan combed the archives and libraries of France. He maps out the elementary structures of the trade and shows how they were transformed as a result of cultural and political as well as commercial and technological changes. In rich ethnographic detail he evokes the dayto-day life of merchants, millers, bakers, brokers, and market officials. He shows how flour superseded grain and how the millers overtook the merchants in the provisioning process. He explores the tension between the suppliers' need for freedom and the consumers' need for security. Even as he weaves the intricate patterns of life inside and outside the marketplace he never loses sight of the immense interests at stake: the stability and legitimacy of the government, the durability of the social structure, and the survival of the people.
Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV
Author: Steven Laurence KaplanPublisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401014043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 844
Book Description
I Modern times has invented its own brand of Apocalypse. Famine is no longer one of the familiar outriders. The problems of material life, and their political and psychological implications, have changed drastically in the course of the past two hundred years. Perhaps nothing has more profoundly affected our institutions and our attitudes than the creation of a technology of abundance. - Even the old tropes have given way: neither dollars nor calories can measure the distance which separates gagne-pain from gagne-hi/leek. 1 Yet the concerns of this book seem much less remote today than they did when it was conceived in the late sixties. In the past few years we have begun to worry, with a sort of expiatory zeal, about the state· of our environment, the size of our population, the political economy and the morality of the allocation of goods and jobs, and the future of our resources. While computer projections cast a malthusian pall over our world, we have had a bitter, first-hand taste of shortages of all kinds. The sempiternal battle between producers and consumers rages with a new ferocity, as high prices provoke anger on the one side and celebration on the other. Even as famines continue to strike the third world in the thermidor of the green revolution, so we have discovered hunger in our own midst.
Mastering the Market
Author: Judith A. MillerPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521621298
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Book Description
The grain trade, a crucial sector of the French economy, caused enormous concern throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bread was the staple of French diets, so harvest shortfalls triggered unrest. The royal government had only the most scattershot and ineffective means to draw foodstuffs into restless cities. Successive regimes developed strategies to dominate the baking trades, influence prices along vital supply lines, and amass emergency stocks of grain that could meet months-long demand. As free trade ideologies developed, French administrators at both the national and local levels sought to reconcile these ideologies with the perceived need to control the market. They created increasingly hidden, and effective, means to shape the grain trade. Thus, the French state played an instrumental role in establishing a viable form of free trade.
Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV
Author: Steven L. KaplanPublisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1783084790
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 817
Book Description
A new edition of Kaplan’s landmark study on eighteenth-century French political economy, reissued with a new Foreword by Sophus A. Reinert. Based on research in all the Parisian depots and more than fifty departmental archives and specialized and municipal libraries, Kaplan’s classic work constitutes a major contribution to the study of the subsistence problem before the French Revolution and the political economy of deregulatory reform. Anthem Press is proud to reissue this path breaking work together with a significant new historiographic companion volume by the author, “The Stakes of Regulation: Perspectives on ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy’ Forty Years Later.”
The Illusion of Free Markets
Author: Bernard E. HarcourtPublisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971329
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.
The American Historical Review
Author: John Franklin JamesonPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic journals
Languages : en
Pages : 934
Book Description
The Origins of Physiocracy
Author: Elizabeth Fox-GenovesePublisher: Ithaca : Cornell University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
The Flour War
Author: Cynthia BoutonPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271042109
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
In the spring of 1775, a series of food riots shook the villages and countryside around Paris. For decades France had been free of famine, but the fall grain harvest had been meager, and the government of the newly crowned King Louis XVI had issued an untimely edict allowing the free commerce of grain within the kingdom. Prices skyrocketed, causing riots to break out in April, first in the market town of Beaumont-sur-Oise, then sweeping through the Paris Basin for the next three weeks. Known as the Flour War, or the guerre des farines, these riots are the subject of Cynthia Bouton's fascinating study. Building upon French historian George Rud&é's pioneering work, Bouton identifies communities of participants and victims in the Flour War, analyzing them according to class, occupation, gender, and location. As typically happened, crowds of common people (menu peuple) confronted those who controlled the grain-bakers, merchants, millers, cultivators, and local authorities. Bouton asks why women of the menu peuple were heavily represented in the riots, often assuming crucial roles as instigators and leaders. In most instances, the people did not steal the provisions but forced those they cornered to sell at a price the rioters deemed &"just.&" Bouton examines this phenomenon, known as taxation populaire, and considers the growing &"sophistication of purpose&" of rioters by placing the Flour War within the larger context of food riots in early modern Europe.
Author: