The politics of the English grain trade, 1314-1815

本项目分析了500年来英国的粮食贸易及其政治。这些政治经常被讨论为前资本主义道德经济（关注分配正义和权利）和新的市场经济（关注利润和市场效率）之间的冲突。后者的胜利被视为政治和经济现代化的一个关键标志。这个项目通过关注商品化的过程而开辟了新天地——一种特定的商品如何被视为一种道德中立的商品，其供应由市场而不是由伦理或道德价值观来调节。在这种背景下，粮食政治似乎不是作为向现代性过渡的标志，而是作为一个更广泛的跨历史现象的一个例子——关于哪些商品可以被视为商品，哪些商品的供应由市场调节的争论。这场辩论具有当代意义，例如在讨论卫生和教育问题时。在探索这一过程中，该项目将把法律、经济和监管变革与伦理问题联系起来，并在人口和粮食供应平衡长期波动以及国际粮食市场发展的背景下转变大众价值观。它将把对贸易结构的新实证研究与对大众政治、诉讼以及面包、磨坊和谷物之间不断变化的文化联系的研究结合起来。例如，在整个时期，面包作为生活必需品和人类的基本权利，在圣经中有着强烈的共鸣，但18世纪面包的日益商品化似乎反映在一种用法的发展中，这种用法使面包成为金钱的同义词。大众政治是理解这些问题的核心，该项目将把农民起义时代的大众政治研究与19世纪有组织的游说和大规模请愿联系起来。粮食暴动是14世纪到18世纪英国人生活中反复出现的特征，就像对谷物磨坊使用权的诉讼一样。后者是1381年农民起义的一个关键问题，该项目将研究从16世纪到18世纪在英国法院发生的大约800起关于碾磨的独立纠纷。但到了19世纪初，民众施加的新形式的压力可以影响玉米贸易的政治经济——尤其是大规模的订阅和游说组织，如反玉米法联盟（Anti-Corn Law League）。这在一定程度上是国家发展的问题——通过对政治经济学和大众政治的研究，该项目也对国家形成的研究做出了贡献。它还开辟了新的领域，采用全球-区域的方法来研究粮食贸易的政治，而不是更传统的国家视角：英国的粮食贸易依赖于德国北部和波兰的类似转变，因为英国市场在结构上依赖于它们的盈余。换句话说，英国粮食贸易的政治是跨国的，这个项目将探讨汉堡和格但斯克在这段时间内的粮食政治。英格兰的许多文化和政治发展与这些粮食出口地区有相似之处。最后，它通过重建谷物碾磨的历史，对我们理解英国贸易的组织和监管做出了重大贡献，这在1500年之后的时期是一个很大程度上被忽视的主题。该项目的独特贡献在于在广泛和多方面的背景下整合了三股实证工作。它包含了一个漫长的时间顺序，通过关注商品化，将文化史更充分地整合到政治经济学的分析中，并将其更坚定地置于跨国背景下，作为一个全球地区的问题，而不仅仅是国内经济监管的问题。

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.