Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (review)

Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict, and Authority. Edited by Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1999) 280 pp. $66.98

Given his outspoken opposition to Theory, it comes as a shock to recognize what a great theorist was Edward P. Thompson. He had a talent for redefining a problem with a striking phrase, then setting off crowds of lesser historians on the track of that problem. More so than his methods, his concrete historical discoveries, or even his vivid prose, Thompson's ideas influenced subsequent work. That is obviously the case with such ideas as the "making" of a working class, which by now has inspired research and debate on five continents. As Adrian Randall, Andrew Charlesworth, and their fellow authors show, the idea of moral economy has likewise had a vast impact on later work in history and the social sciences.

Thompson first broadcast the idea of moral economy in a 1971 article on the eighteenth-century English crowd published by Past & Present. ¹ In 1992, eighteen months before Thompson's death, Randall and Charlesworth brought Thompson together with a number of scholars who had adopted, adapted, or reacted to the idea, not so much for critique of the original article as for assessment of its organizing notion in the light of their own work. (Alas, the volume contains no transcript of Thompson's remarks in 1992.) Randall and Charlesworth have now published their own general essay in the company of eight more specialized analyses by Buchanan Sharp, John Bohstedt, Douglas Hay, David Arnold, Edward Countryman, John Rule, James C. Scott, and Roger Wells. They offer us not only a historiographical adventure, but also a feast of historical studies.

Thompson's argument combined six major elements: (1) vigorous rejection of economic reductionism in the explanation of struggles over food; (2) identification of events that authorities called riots as struggles pitting well-defined antagonists against each other; (3) insistence on the centrality of historically formed and widely shared mentalities (as opposed to hunger-induced impulses) in those struggles; (4) characterization of those mentalities as centering on traditional rights and customs giving local communities prior rights to their own production; (5) derivation of that moral economy from an even older paternalist model of local protection that was disintegrating by the eighteenth century, as well as from reaction against the market-driven ideology of political economy; (6) explanation of the circumstances, routines, and consequences of food riots as enactments of moral-economy principles. By and large, this volume's contributors take points 1-3 for granted, concentrating their attention on 4-6--the content of the moral economy, its historical development, and its embodiment in open conflicts. The major exceptions are Arnold, Countryman, and Scott, who examine equivalents of the moral economy in nineteenth-century India, eighteenth-century America, and twentieth-century Malaya.

Not that the authors all agree with Thompson's original formulation. Sharp's documentation of fourteenth-century food riots greatly resembling their eighteenth-century successors raises doubts about Thompson's chronology, Bohstedt scores Thompson for exaggerating the traditionalism of English crowds, and Rule challenges general application of moral economy ideas to eighteenth-century industrial relations. No author, in fact, endorses everything Thompson said on the subject--if only because (as Randall and Charlesworth document in their introduction) Thompson himself employed the notion inconsistently. In this field, we should be grateful for strong ideas that stimulate important new research. Thompson's idea of the moral economy certainly qualifies.

Charles Tilly
Columbia University

Note

1. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present, 50 (1971), 76-136.

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