Grain Riots and the "Moral Economy": Cairo, 1350-1517

Abstract

Grain Riots and the Moral Economy: Cairo, I350-I5I7 Social historians have been urging us in recent years to recognize both the historical significance and the intricate nature of grain riots. Rude, studying popular uprisings in eighteenth-century England and France, has depicted grain riots as the typical manifestation of social protest which separated the strikes and labor disputes of the Industrial Era from the millennial movements of the Middle Ages. We are especially indebted to his effort to reconstruct the meaningful world of rioting crowds, and dispel the notion of the faceless mob. More lately, Thompson and Tilly have argued that grain riots were not mere spasmodic acts, and both have rejected the simplistic correlation between social disturbances and high food prices. In their view grain riots in eighteenth-century England and France not only expressed discontent with actual deprivation, but were a reaction to structural changes in the political economies of the two countries.1 In England the change came with the erosion of the paternalistic tradition of grain supply which supposed direct marketing from farmers to consumers and the ability of the poor to purchase grain before dealers. This tradition was replaced sometime in the eighteenth century by Adam Smith's new economic model of self-regulating market and self-adjusting economy. As for France, the economic transition there was the result of the centralization

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