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“A Just and Profitable Commerce”: Moral Economy and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Susan E. Brown
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Extract

It has been twenty years since E. P. Thompson introduced the term “moral economy” into the historian's vocabulary. Since then it has exerted a paradigmatic force in explanations of the motivations for, and responses to, various forms of popular action. Pitted against this has been the notion of political economy, most often presented as a subsequent (and eventually triumphant) ideological development that was necessarily antithetical to a moral economy. Together these two models have served as fundamental reference points around which accounts of popular protest and public policy have been constructed. Recent explorations into past assumptions regarding the proper functioning of the marketplace have served to open this conventional schematization to debate. Thompson himself has once again entered the fray with a further refinement and restatement of his original arguments and a spirited riposte to his critics. The purpose of the following essay is to focus and further develop this debate in light of the author's ongoing research into the City of London in the late eighteenth century.

In seeking to loosen the constructs through which past economic relations and ideologies have been characterized, this essay will concentrate on two main areas of enquiry. The first follows the work of other historians in attempting to probe more deeply into the diverse and often conflicting understandings of the marketplace articulated in this period, thus revealing alternate possibilities in the interstices of moral economy and political economy. The second as yet remains relatively unexplored and concerns a series of assumptions as to who might be expected to advocate these various conceptions of market relations and why.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 4: Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700-1850 , October 1993 , pp. 305 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1993

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References

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29 CCJ, vol. 79, fol. 60.

30 Minutes and papers of the Committee to Enquire into the High Price of Provisions, 1800–1802, CLRO MSS 94.24.

31 Report of the committee on the High Price of Provisions, 1801, CLRO, Papers, Accounts, Reports, bk. 2, fol. 295.

32 Wells (n. 5 above), p. 86; Girdler (n. 10 above).

33 Court of Aldermen Repertory (CA Rep) 204, CLRO, fol. 412.

34 CCJ, vol. 79, fols. 197–99; CA Rep 204, fols. 414–33; Wells, pp. 120–32.

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41 Hont, I. and Ignatieff, M., “Needs and Justice in the Wealth of Nations,” in their Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wells (n. 5 above), p. 80.

42 The Times (August 1, 1800).

43 The Times (December 27, 1800). While most “interventionist” commentators agreed that the state had the right to ensure a fair price for articles of sustenance, the communitarian emphasis of this letter is unusual.

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45 Bohstedt, p. 209, following on from Rudé, George, “The Growth of Cities and Popular Revolt, 1750–1850,” in French Government and Society, 1500–1850, ed. Bosher, J. F. (London, 1973), pp. 172, 190Google Scholar, acknowledges that the City of London may have been an exception to this typology of urban social relations.

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47 Bohstedt, p. 94.

48 Guildhall Library, London, Noble Collection, “Combe.”

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53 Girdler (n. 10 above), p. 255.

54 Thomas Dornford, an activist on the committee for public mills, came from a strong Methodist background; Alderman Paul Lemesurier, who chaired the 1786 committee on abuses at Smithfield market, was a member of both the Society for Propagating the Gospel and the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (SBCP; though the SBCP fits into Hilton's laissez-faire school of evangelicalism); and Alderman Thomas Cadell, who led the inquiry into the exorbitant profits of metropolitan millers, was a director of the Foundling Hospital. See Dornford, Josiah, Some Memoirs of the Life and Death of Mrs Eleanor Dornford, 2d ed. (London, 1805)Google Scholar; Andrew (n. 9 above), app. s.v. “Major Donors.”

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56 Wells (n. 5 above), p. 328.

57 Going through the lists of the more active members of the Corporation's provisions committees, one finds a stationer, haberdasher, laceman, wax chandler, and attorney. Few committee members had any direct interest in the provisions trade themselves though a tea broker, a grocer, and two seedsmen can be identified among the activists. See CLRO Misc. MSS 118.2, 113.3, 119.2, 94.24, and the following London trade directories: Kent's (London, 1782–1800)Google Scholar, Lowndes's (London, 1784, 1796)Google Scholar, Universal British (London, 1791)Google Scholar.

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59 CLRO PAR bk. 2, 295.

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61 See Wahrman, Dror, “Virtual Representation: Parliamentary Reporting and Languages of Class in the 1790s,” Past and Present, no. 136 (1992), pp. 83–113Google Scholar, who argues that a middle-class idiom in the late eighteenth century was a highly contested assertion.

62 Hilton (n. 50 above); Claeys (n. 2 above), chap. 1.

63 The Times (November 10, 1800).