Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland have long made use of E.P. Thompson’s concept of a moral economy. Still forced to contend with the last echoes of a nationalist orthodoxy in which every act of protest is assumed to have been part of an ongoing war against foreign occupation, they have found in Thompson’s language a useful shorthand for interpretations that emphasise instead the complexity of relationships between rulers and ruled. But such appropriation involves the dilution of what was originally a very specific argument. When Thomas Bartlett, in 1983, went so far as to talk of resistance to compulsory enlistment in the militia in terms of a moral economy, Thompson himself was moved to comment. He had coined the term, he pointed out, to describe a specific set of practices that had protected poorer customers in the food markets of eighteenth-century England from extreme fluctuations in supply and price. It was now being extended to take in the more broadly defined relationships of ‘unequal mutuality’ that were to be found in virtually every society

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