Module 3: Riots

13.1: EP Thompson – Moral Economy of English Crowd in the 18th CE

 Study of the poor prior to the French Revolution = limited to events of social disturbances =
spasmodic.
 Traditional literature views poor as compulsive and irrational  mob behavior/crowd theory
 Riots as “rebellions of the belly”.
 Rostow: social tension chart: unemployment + high food prices  social disturbance
 Thompson: people protest when they are hungry deprivation  Structural Approach
 Traditional theory represents poor protesters as being irrational and responding elementary
economic stimuli, ignoring the role of motives, behavior and function (as a complex
system). Thompson claims the core of the issue to be HUNGER  a need  which
legitimized the uproar in two ways: they believed (1) they were defending traditional
rights or customs (2) they were supported by the wider consensus of the community >
overrode motives of fear or deterrence.
 18th CE Food Riots:
 Popular action, organized and w/ clear objectives.
 Causes: higher prices of bread  hunger  grievances  consensus as to what practices
are legitimate and illegitimate  based on view of social norms = paternalistic view of the
state = moral economy of the poor
 Moral Economy of the Poor: Food Riots were grounded upon a consistent traditional
view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties
within the community, which, taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy
of the poor.
 Mobs before the French Revolution were seen as spasmodic and were not taken as agents of history
 Old View: Mobs are compulsive and are driven by economic stimuli
 Thomson thinks of these explanations as crass economic reductionism
 Criticizes scholarship for knowing all about Melanesian tribesmen who are in their opinion
infinitely complex social creatures but the English poor are not studied by the same lens
and they are seen as mere economic creatures
 Thompson: It is possible to detect in almost every eighteenth-century crowd action some
legitimizing notion.
 Men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending
traditional rights or customs; and, in general, that they were supported by the wider consensus
of the community. On
 This popular consensus was endorsed by authorities and was enough to override fear or
deference
 In 18th century England highly-sensitive consumer-consciousness co-existed with the great age of
agricultural improvement
 The fortunes of those most vigorous capitalist classes rested, upon the sale of cereals, meat
and wool with little intermediary processing
 The working classes lived largely on bread
 It was to the advantage of bakers and of millers to sell white bread or fine flour, since the
profit which might be gained from such sales was, in general, larger as compared to bread
made from barley or rye
 Consumer Protection:
  Millers and Bakers were thought to be the servants of the community, working not for a
profit but for a fair allowance
 the baker's allowance or profit was calculated strictly according to the Assize of Bread,
whereby either the price or the weight of the loaf was ordered in relation to the ruling price
of wheat
 By 1733 the practices of buying in samples, traders buying directly from farms and not
selling grain in the market to avoid the law were being adopted all across England
 The paternalistic model was failing. The paternalists did recognize much of the change, but they
referred back to this model whenever emergency arose. In this they were in part the prisoners of
the people, who adopted parts of the model as their right and heritage
 Often punitive action against forestallers was performative in nature, to placate the people and show
them that the government stood by their side
 Intellectual victory of the proponents of a free market:
 The debate between 1767 and 1772 which culminated in the repeal of legislation against
forestalling, signaled a victory, in this area, for laisser-faire four years before Adam
Smith's work was published
 the new political economy was disinfested of intrusive moral imperatives. The old
pamphleteers (paternalists) were moralists first and economists second. In the new
economic theory questions as to the moral polity of marketing do not enter, unless as
preamble and pero
 In the new model:
 Natural operation of supply and demand would satisfy everyone’s needs through unfettered
market operation
 Price of corn would adjust itself
 After the harvest small farmers would bring their corn to the market in order to pay wages,
debts etc> selling corn at a low price out of necessity till Christmas
 Middle farmers would hold their corn till spring in hopes of a rising market
 Rich farmers would hold their corn till May to catch the market on top
 Whereas the first appeals to a moral norm - what ought to be men's reciprocal duties - the second
appears to say: "this is the way things work, or would work if the State did not interfere
 It is notorious that the demand for corn, or bread, is highly inelastic. When bread is costly,
the poor (as one highly-placed observer was once reminded) do not go over to cake
 The working classes cut on other essentials to buy bread, like meat and dairy
 Producing and trading interests as a whole were able, with a long- continuing train of
favorable circumstances, to take advantage of their command of a prime necessity of life
and to enhance the price to the consumer
 Indeed, one may suggest that if the rioting or price-setting crowd acted according to any consistent
theoretical model, then this model was a selective reconstruction of the paternalist one, taking from
it all those features which most favored the poor and which offered a prospect of cheap corn
 Moving on from the use of the “riot” as a blunt tool of analysis, Thompson delves deeper to discern
patterns of behavior in the “rioting” crowds
 The characteristic form of direct action is not the riot but the rising of the people which happened
very frequently in the 18th century> where workers, tinners, colliers etc rose
 These were disciplined uprisings and almost always focused on setting the price
 they resulted in the local bureaucracy implementing their emergency powers in bringing
grain back to the market from stores
  But in places where the magistrates did not enforce the law, people took it upon themselves
to do so, with the awareness that what they were doing was lawful and moral
 The crowd divided itself in parties in some places and raided storages where the grain was
kept and where it was marketed to set a price. They also demanded the rich to contribute
for the welfare of the poor of the city, on some occasions the rich complied with the wishes
of the crowd but in some places the crowd forced them to pay up
 a perambulating crowd in the Thames valley called themselves "the Regulators”
 The pattern continues in the 1790s: at Ellesmere (Salop.) the crowd stopping the corn as it
goes to the mills and threatening the farmers individually; in the Forest of Dean the miners
visiting mills and farmers' houses, and exacting money "from persons they meet in the road";
in West Cornwall the tinners visiting farms with a noose in one hand and an agreement to
bring corn at reduced prices to market in the other
 It is the restraint, rather than the disorder, which is remarkable; and there can be no doubt
that the actions were approved by an over- whelming population
 There is a deeply-felt conviction that prices ought, in times of dearth, to be regulated, and that the
profiteer put himself out
 Crowds often by force or persuasion requested government officials to preside over their
operations, sometimes asking them to take the confiscated grain in their custody or receive money
for the grain they had sold, at the right price, after confiscation
Thomson suggests that violence and looting was mostly seen in cases where the bakers or butchers
refused to comply + Or where agreements had been broken by the sellers or where the authorities
had fired at the crowds + Or where the crowd was sold spoilt and low quality grain
 The crowd had its sources of information and was aware of the local facts far better than the gentry
 b/c they worked on the docks. They moved the barges on the canals. They drove the carts
and manned the toll-gates. They worked in the granaries and the mills
 Basically they knew about all the tricks the sellers had up their sleeves
 Women played a huge role in these riots and often led them, they were aware of the fact that the
authorities would treat them a little better than the men and they used this to great effect
 They gave out pamphlets clearly stating a time and place where they would assemble, these
pamphlets in some cases explicitly called on the women of the area to join
 Instances of price setting often emerged from bargaining disputes between women and
sellers which resulted in collective hooting or jeering to protest high prices
 Occasionally, large employers of laborers were alleged to have encouraged their own workers to
act.
 Farm labor was hesitant in initiating or participating in a protest because they were sold
grain at lower prices by their employers and also because they faced harsher repercussions
 In truth, the food riot did not require a high degree of organization. It required a consensus
of support in the community, and an inherited pattern of action with its own objectives and
restrictions
 Were the food riots successful?
 In the short term they seemed to have failed because farmers refused to bring grain to the
market out of fear and intimidation
 Failed to change the price
 But only the expectation of riot did have a considerable impact on the market situation

16.1: Hossain - Food Riots, Food Rights and Politics of Provisions

 Roots of the global shift in citizen-state relations lie in the politics of subsistence and struggles for
natural rights  homogenous issue but variety in repertoires due to (1) regime type (2) degree of
authoritarianism.
 Media portrayal of poor people riots (2007-08 & 2011) as “food riots”, represented as “they came
across as the uncontrolled spasms of hungry mobs demanding food”.
 Financial Crisis Impact:
 Globalization = Integration = every country effected by crisis + economic changes
 Financial crisis + hiking prices of food = protests in low income countries  led to people
protesting on the streets against the government for its failure to provide essentials and protect
citizens  uncivil protests which sometimes got violent
 Protests encapsulated a powerful popular sense of entitlement and political awareness.
 Represented the ‘terminal crisis’ of the US economic and political domination + potential for
shift to another site of capital accumulation  protests as coping mechanism to adjust to this
change.
 Immediate causes of riots  grievances + underlying need to gain rights that have been
denied.
 Protests were outside the formal modes of making claims on government and authorities to
challenge the laws and policies that were failing to protect people on low incomes from hunger and
to include them as persons with standing in the political system  questioned legitimacy of elite
 Politics of Provision: “ the ways in (which) common people interacted with their rulers over
subsistence, . . . permitted and shaped by pre-existing social and political networks, both among
rioters and between them and their rulers”
 Operated at local, national and international level linking the protests horizontally between
affected citizens.
 When episodes of riots combine w/ issues of food system  politics of provision
 Cases: Bangladesh, India, Cameroon, Mozambique and Kenya.
 Two types of protests found:
1. Against corruption, unaccountability and failures of representation.
2. Food related protests.
 Food Riots:
 Had a geographical divide: usually recorded in low- and middle-income countries, the latter
often under authoritarian regimes.
 Nonviolent in the south
 Even included participation of people close to power advocating policy reforms.
 DEF: Political actions that counter the usual order and whose participants legitimate their
claims with reference to a moral economy; specifically, a shared understanding that food
markets should work for people.
 Signals of distress + need of recognition in formal politics
 Importance of Media Framing; why it matters?
 Food Riots resonates image of ‘hungry-angry-crowd’  framing in international media.
 Food Riots represent a fragile legitimacy (economically and politically) of a regime in which
the events have occurred  since it’s a protest against government failure to protect and
provide.
 Riot against neoliberal food economics.
 London Riots de-certified as legitimate struggle b/c  struggle of people in similarly
constrained (as food riots) and unequal circumstances in London = extreme consumerism
deprivation vs Food Struggle in South  morally necessary justified by the corruption of
 those regimes = but both based on what people value as essentials for living a good life.
(London protest not moral in media)
 Food riot cause because tummy rumbles? No, because a lot of those participating in the food
riots were not hungry = political issue not physiological.
 Food security linked to conflict and human security = food riots as sign of food insecurity  desire
to seek change for perceived injustices.

Politics of Provision
 National Subsistence Settlements
 Contending groups of different actors who decide their relation with one another on the basis
of the distribution of power and subsistence resources.
 BoP shaped by the ‘holding power’ of different groups = demands from individual common
man for food when combined = mass scale demand + with leadership = source of power.
 Competitive settlement vs dominated by single party: enhances/constrains change & in which
domains.
 Nature of relations (client vs impersonalized): affects which policies are chosen
 Is market controlled or unleashed affects stability  regulation and protectionism?
 States prioritize food security b/c of the effect of subsistence crisis: population displacement
(loss of labor) + civil unrest + urban unrest = politicization of affected groups + signals
state/regime vulnerability
 Politics of Provision affected by:
1. Horizontal relationships: b/w those who are suffering food shortage
2. Vertical relationships between people and authorities.
 Driving Forces affecting the Politics/Issue of Provision:
What factors influence the nature of the riots, extent of the crisis and nature of the response?
1. Global Food Regimes
 Different arrangements of the production, finance, distribution and use of foodstuff in
different parts of the world depending on needs of time and place  change in economic
functions + relations = change in food systems.
 First GFR: Colonial: colonies exported surplus to provide to the West and promote their
industrialization  integration  colonialism causing food shortages.
 Second GFR: Post-colonial: states focused on national economic development: import
substitution + self-sufficiency in food security.
 Third GFR: Corporate Food Regime: mass production, standardized foods and global
supply chains dominate.
 Each regime has reshaped the politics of development + influenced the direction of
technological and social change.
 Reflects history of capitalism
 Reserve Army of Labor: farmers who are forced to leave the land as it no longer pays in
competition with global agri-business, they become reserves for export processing zones.
 This fundamental contradiction, whereby ‘free markets’ exclude and/or starve populations
dispossessed by their very implementation = characterizes the corporate food regime and is
one of the sources of today’s food riots.  Era of globalization has been premised on the
food regime’s generation of cheap labor and its supply of relatively cheap industrial foods
to subsidize labor costs.
2. Global Food Price Crisis
  Dramatic rise of food prices b/c (i) food shortage due to poor harvests in main supplying
countries (ii) high fuel prices affected fertilizer use (iii) deregulation of commodity markets
= capital was able to flood out of unstable subprime housing and commodity markets and
into other markets when money moved out of commodity markets = banking collapse =
pricing fell.
 Concatenation of food, fuel and financial turbulence that transmitted to retail prices in the
developing world  prices shot up everywhere
 Mesh of global agricultural systems with global financial system  price volatility.
 2012: financial crisis over but left behind national crisis  chronic subsistence stress +
sustained political unrest = belief that political economy of provision had drifted away
from natural justice.
3. Labor Value
 Changes in people’s lives after period of spikey and volatile prices.
 Wages never caught up with the rising cost of living for the poorest = more work more
burden.
 How people viewed inflation  poorer people in general disliked inflation but the extent
depended on the relationship between inflation and unemployment, and how it affected
their country and their individual efforts. Inflation as top priority for poor because they
suffer the most.
 Threshold for inflation = key macroeconomic issue in the politics of provision.
 Unemployment vs inflation: which is a bigger concern for poor? Higher current inflation
or unemployment creates the effect of improved optimism, not because the future is
assessed as more favorable but because individuals believe the present looks grimmer.
 Double Movement:
 In response to the dangers of economic liberalism.
 1st Movement: towards greater commodification + free markets
 But consequence of this will be destruction and wilderness = backlash
 2nd Movement: towards greater protection  move towards institutionalizing
redistribution, recognition and representation.
 The Moral Economy:
 Why did protests come onto the street despite possibility of state repression?
 Defending traditional rights or customs = what is good for all (primordial righteousness)
 when this law is violated  consensus to riot/protest. This also explains why food riots
may persist across different economic cycles (b/c food = primordial right).
 With each era of capitalism, roles (of citizens, state and market), relations and governing
laws have changed.
 Critical events signal crisis  Consequences (power of morals)
1. Generate mass suffering which leads to new modalities of political action  Access to food
and employment had become a major contention due to price spikes and unmatched wage
increases = people hungry
2. All this changed political identities.
Why? b/c people out to protest loss of assets, patronage and erosion of traditional identities.
Others  Mozambique: rioters treated as enemies of the state = “embattled urban class”.
3. Suffering becomes a narrative trope: state appropriates the suffering
4. Logic of the Riot:
 Meant to demonstrate the presence of the nonexistent
16.2: Gary Marx – Issueless Riots
 Past literature on collective action inconsiderate of riots w/o protests, ideology and grievance =
need to bring them in.
 Early theorists focused on emotions of crowd  opportunism + destruction as expression of human
impulses = “dirty people without name”  irrational crowd composed of social misfits, criminals
and riffraff (lowest classes).
Marx agreed to contemporary theories (Smelser): crowd as rational moving towards a particular
goal.
 Rude’s research: French & English crowd in 18th century + Black Riot = Debunks classical theory
Correct old theory
 Crowd: Old riots: Composed of those well integrated into society but with specific
grievances such as the ordinary urban poor (laborers) -- employed people with settled
abode and without criminal conviction + Black Riots: consisted of amalgamated black
youth
 Sympathy towards rioters today  rational, instrumental and purposeful.  tied to
injustice & strain.
 Typology of Riots emerges based on two factors:
1. Presence of a generalized belief: fundamental changes in values or norms?
2. Whether the riot is instrumental in helping solve a group’s problem: if the violent action itself
directly solves the problem?
 Forms of Riots:
1. GB + I: bread riots (more dissident)
2. GB + NI: communal rights (more diffused)
3. NGB + I: riots misinterpreted by authorities
4. NGB + NI: riots during police strikes, riots in victory
 Principled Riots: 1 + 2
 Presence of generalized belief
 Develops out of prolonged community conflict
 Unprincipled/issueless Riots: 3+4
 Develop under 2 conditions: (1) in the face of a pronounced weakening of the agents of
social control (2) expressive outbursts which occasionally accompany victory celebrations
or ritualized festivals.
1. Riots when police go on strike
 May increase violations of traditional rules.
 1919 Liverpool police strike  youthful rioters dominated the streets + looting, destroying
property, drinking… was less hostile in the beginning w/o belief
2. Riots in victory & celebrations
 Less spontaneous (when to happen) + institutionalized
 But some spontaneity as to how the riot will play out.
 John Wikes case: show link b/w celebration & destruction (rest seemed like bs)
 Hypothesis:
 Type 1 more controlled and patterned + less damaging than type 2 or 4.
 Type 2 + 4  psychological characteristics of crowd members & traditional crowd
processes more intense than 1.
 Number of ideologically driver rioters diminishes as riot progresses and opportunists
join in to take advantage.
  Selectivity in attacks
 Generalized belief in 2 more magical than 1.
 Riots of types 2 & 4 will inspire less serious and disciplined efforts at social control
than will I; although the nature of the social-control response plays an important part
in any collective outburst, variations in it will be felt to a greater extent in types II and
IV than I.
 Rioters in type 4 more likely to be in lower social position + less integrated into society >
1&2
Type 1  powerful groups compared to 2
Type 2  more likely to involve an ethnic minority
 Type 4 = less hostile and more playful  attacks on authority based on self-defense
 Ghetto Riots
 Black ghetto riots of 1960s
 1 + 2  focused on community conflict, clear grievances & slogans/symbols.
 Generalized belief = key