The Politics of the English Grain Trade, 1314-1815

This project analyses the English grain trade and its politics over a 500-year period. Those politics have often been discussed in terms of a conflict between a pre-capitalist moral economy (concerned with distributive justice and entitlement) and a new, market economy (concerned with profit and market efficiency). The triumph of the latter has been seen as a key marker of political and economic modernity. This project breaks new ground by focussing instead on the process of commodification-how a particular good comes to be seen as a morally-neutral commodity, the supply of which is regulated by the market rather than by ethical or moral values. In that context the politics of grain appears not as a marker of the transition to modernity but as an example of a much broader transhistorical phenomenon-the contest over which goods can be treated as commodities the supply of which is regulated by the market. This debate has contemporary relevance for example in discussions of health and education.
In exploring this process the project will relate legal, economic and regulatory change to ethical questions and shifting popular values in the context of long swings in the balance of population and food supply, and of the development of international markets in grain. It will combine new empirical work on the structure of the trade with research into popular politics and litigation and the shifting cultural associations of bread, mills and grain. For example, there were strong biblical resonances for bread throughout the period as the stuff of life and a basic human entitlement, but the increasing commodification of bread in the 18th century seems to have been reflected in the development of a usage making bread a synonym for money.
Popular politics are central to an understanding of these issues, and the project will connect the study of popular politics in the age of peasant revolt to that of organised lobbies and mass petitioning of the 19th century. Grain riots were a recurring feature of English life between the 14th and 18th centuries, as was litigation over access to grain mills. The latter was a key issue in the Peasants' revolt of 1381 and the project will examine around 800 separate disputes over milling in English courts from the 16th to the 18th centuries. By the early 19th century though new forms of popular pressure were available to shape the political economy of the trade-notably in large-scale subscription and lobbying organisations such as the Anti-Corn Law League. This is partly a matter of the development of the state-through the study of political economy and popular politics the project also makes a contribution to the study of state formation.
It also breaks new ground by taking a global-regional approach to the study of the politics of the grain trade, rather than the more conventional national perspective: the English grain trade relied on similar transformations in northern Germany and Poland as English markets became structurally dependent on their surpluses. The politics of the English grain trade were, in other words, transnational, and the project will explore the politics of grain Hamburg and Gdansk across this long period. Many cultural and political developments in England had parallels in these grain exporting areas. Finally, it makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the organisation and regulation of the trade in England through a reconstruction of the history of grain milling, which is a largely neglected subject in the period after 1500.
The distinctive contribution of the project lies in integrating three strands of empirical work in a broad and multifaceted context. It embraces a long chronological sweep, integrates cultural history more fully into analysis of political economy by focussing on commodification and places this more firmly in a transnational context, as an issue for a global region and not just a matter of domestic economic regulation.