This book developed from a conference held in 1992 to mark the 'coming of age' of E.P.Thompson's seminal concept of 'the moral economy'. The collection provides a critical evaluation of the original concept and of its application to a wide and diverse field of scholarship, drawing together specialists from social and labour history, legal history, social, anthropology and historical geography who examine the developing utilisation of the concept of 'the moral economy' in different historical and societal contexts.
Preface Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors The Moral Economy: Riots, Markets and Social Conflict; A.Randall and A.Charlesworth The Food Riots of 1347 and the Medieval Moral Economy; B.Sharp The Pragmatic Economy, the Politics of Provisions and the 'Invention' of the Food Riot Tradition in 1740; J.Bohstedt Moral Economy, Political Economy and Law; D.Hay Food Riots Revisited: Popular Protest and Moral Economy in Nineteenth-Century India; D.Arnold Moral Economy, Political Economy and the American Bourgeois Revolution; E.Countryman Industrial Disputes, Wage Bargaining and the Moral Economy; J.Rule The Moral Economy as an Argument and as a Fight; J.C.Scott The Moral Economy of the English Countryside; R.Wells Index
