Food Rioting in Ireland in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The 'Moral Economy' and the Irish Crowd

James Kelly

• Publisher: Four Courts Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781846826900
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Food rioting, one of the most studied manifestations of purposeful protest internationally, was practised in Ireland for a century and a half between the early eighteenth century and 1860. This book provides a fully documented account of this phenomenon, and seeks to lay the foundations for a more structured analysis of popular protest during a period when riotous behaviour was normative. Though the study challenges E.P. Thompson's influential contention that there was no 'moral economy' in Ireland because Ireland did not provide the populace with the 'political space' in which they could bring pressure to bear on the elite, its primary achievement is, by demonstrating the enduring character of food rioting, to move the crowd from the periphery to the centre. In the process, it offers a rereading of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish history, and of the public response to the Great Famine. [Subject: History, the Great Famine, Irish Studies, 18th & 19th Century Studies, Social History]

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• CONTENTS
• TABLES, MAPS, ILLUSTRATIONS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• The chronology and geography of Irish food protest,c.1700–c.1860
• Patterns of food protest
• The structure of food protest
• The response of the authorities and public to food protest
• Was there an Irish ‘moral economy’?
• Epilogue: the subsistence crisis of 1861–2
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX